Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 5 of 11

Water Lilies, Claude Monet, painted 1922. 

Over the last 20 years of his life the Impressionist painter Claude Monet produced around 250 paintings of the waterlilies and plants he cultivated in his elaborate water garden in Giverny, in Normandy in northern France. 

He began with sun dappled landscapes in the standard compositional structure, of foreground, middle ground and distance. But with time and his failing eyesight, shifted to something more abstract, even spiritual. As you can see in this sublime painting, found in his studio at the time of his death. 

In cool blue and purple tones, Monet chooses an unusually cropped view for this large format canvas, to immerse the viewer and show the changing light conditions on water, an effect he’d been interested in since his early days, when he used a small boat as a studio.

Across the top of the canvas, the long blades of grass move from emerald green to yellow seeming to hover over the mesmerising water. While the reflection of trees overhead lies at the base of the painting. An upside-down world beneath the water’s surface. The overall movement of layers of horizontal brush strokes, worked up and down is interrupted by loosely painted lilies, streaky, with blue and turquoise barely mixed in. To the right, a crimson outline skirts the lily pads.

Is it as spontaneous as the stray orange streak that appears in the grass above? In fact, Monet has used so many shades of green and purple, from mauve, to electric lavender, that they all coalesce in a single, fathomless surface, that’s dynamic and tranquil. 

Monet’s eventual purchase of his home and studio at Giverny represented a domestic and financial stability that had eluded him for much of his career. In the years prior, he and his wife and children had been forced to move in with his married patrons, the once-wealthy Hoschedes, who were now also in financial strife. After the tragic death of his wife Camille, Monet married Alice Hoschede and their large, blended family moved into the estate.

By the time he painted this work, Monet was in his early 80s and had outlived both his wives and a son. The garden at Giverny was now a glorious, sprawling project and the waterlily paintings, his abiding passion of the last two decades, one of his late, but most radical, innovations.