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Water Lilies

Painting of a pond seen up close spotted with thickly painted pink and white water lilies and a shadow across the top third of the picture.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • Painting of a pond seen up close spotted with thickly painted pink and white water lilies and a shadow across the top third of the picture.

Date:

1906

Artist:

Claude Monet
French, 1840-1926

About this artwork

“One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all,” said Claude Monet, referring to his late masterpieces, the water landscapes that he produced at his home in Giverny between 1897 and his death in 1926. These works replaced the varied contemporary subjects he had painted from the 1870s through the 1890s with a single, timeless motif—water lilies. The focal point of these paintings was the artist’s beloved flower garden, which featured a water garden and a smaller pond spanned by a Japanese footbridge. In his first water-lily series (1897–99), Monet painted the pond environment, with its plants, bridge, and trees neatly divided by a fixed horizon. Over time, the artist became less and less concerned with conventional pictorial space. By the time he painted Water Lilies, which comes from his third group of these works, he had dispensed with the horizon line altogether. In this spatially ambiguous canvas, the artist looked down, focusing solely on the surface of the pond, with its cluster of vegetation floating amid the reflection of sky and trees. Monet thus created the image of a horizontal surface on a vertical one.

Status

On View, Gallery 243

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist

Claude Monet

Title

Water Lilies

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1906

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Inscribed at lower right: Claude Monet 1906

Dimensions

89.9 × 94.1 cm (35 3/8 × 37 1/16 in.)

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

Reference Number

1933.1157

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/16568/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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