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Contents
Monet’s Water Lilies | An overview of the series
The Water Lilies or Nymphéas series by Claude Monet has approximately 250 oil paintings in the collection, depicting the water lily pond and its surrounding garden at his home in Giverny.
Period: Late 1890s to 1926
Medium: Oil
Art style: Impressionist
Size range: 46 x 56 cm to 200 x 1700 cm, with some circular paintings, and some paintings unknown in size and seen only in photographs.
Display locations: Museum of Modern Art in New York, Musée Marmottan Monet, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, The Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Legion of Honor.
The Water Lilies Room at MoMA
Water Lilies (1914-26)
- Dimensions: A triptych, with each panel measuring 200 x 424.8 cm, and overall 200 x 1276 cm
- About the painting: This triptych may be one of the most known and recognized pieces of art to have ever existed in history. Monet envisioned 40 large-scale panels in a circular installation that he called grandes décorations, which would combine flora, aqua, and the sky and immerse the viewer in its entirety. The triptych is a part of this installation, and he worked and reworked it continuously from 1914 until his passing in 1926.
Agapanthus (1914-26)
- Dimensions: 198.2 x 178.4 cm
- About the painting: Monet loved painting outdoors, immersed in his garden, and the agapanthus plants along the banks of his pond, among many others, were quite the source of inspiration for him during his final years. The painting shows the love, care, and deep affection he felt for his surroundings and the connection between him and his home in Giverny.
Water Lilies (1914-26)
- Dimensions: 199.5 x 599 cm
- About the painting: The series highlights how he views the same subject matter, his water lilies, in different lights across different times during the day and over the seasons, and this painting captures exactly that. Starkly different from the other works on display at the exhibit, you can tell how the light plays with the pond’s surface, adding a shimmery, silvery, almost ethereal effect to the work.
The Water Lilies exhibit room and its making
Location: Floor 5, 515, The David Geffen Wing
Organized by: Ann Temkin with Lydia Mullin, Charlotte Barat, and Jennifer Harris
Important dates:
- 1955: The Museum of Modern Art becomes the first museum in the US to acquire Claude Monet’s large-scale panels.
- 1959: The Water Lilies triptych and Water Lilies, was acquired by MoMA, and funded by the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.
- 1959: Agapanthus, gifted to MoMA by Sylvia Slifka, arrives at MoMA.
- 2009: The paintings are displayed as a part of Monet’s ongoing “Water Lilies” exhibit at the museum.
Monet’s most notable works
- Impression, Sunrise (1872): Impression, Sunrise, was one of the paintings showcased at an independent exhibition in 1874 organized by Monet for artists rejected by Salon de Paris. Louis Leroy, a critic, used the painting as a reference to coin the term “Impressionist" that defined the art movement.
- Haystacks Series (1890-91): Haystacks was Monet's first series of paintings, displayed at Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891. The exhibit, which included 15 paintings, acted as a breakthrough moment in his career and increased the popularity of the Impressionist movement.
- Rouen Cathedral Series (1892-94): One of his best-known series, Monet created the 26 views of Rouen Cathedral over two years. He rented spaces across the cathedral and set up studios for his paintings in 1892 and 1893 and reworked them in his studio in 1894.
- Water Lilies Series (1896-1926): The largest series created by the artist, Water Lilies consists of around 250 paintings. He worked on them for the last 30 years of his life, and he painted many of them while his vision deteriorated over time due to cataracts.
Claude Monet and the Impressionist movement
Monet is credited with being one of the first impressionist artists, moving away from realism and the traditional methods of painting, by using more free-flowing and abstract brush strokes.
One of the key components that separated him from other artists in his era was that he painted outdoors, “en plein air”, and created “impressions” of what he would see, instead of exact replications, which was the norm. His broad strokes created a blurred landscape, a fleeting version of what one would see, a more abstract way of painting.
