Historical Context
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series, known collectively as Les Nympheas, represents one of the most ambitious and sustained artistic projects in the history of Western painting. Spanning roughly the last three decades of the artist’s life, from the mid-1890s until his death in 1926, the series comprises approximately 250 oil paintings depicting the water garden Monet designed and cultivated at his property in Giverny, a small village in Normandy about eighty kilometers northwest of Paris. The 1906 canvas now at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to a particularly concentrated period of production between 1903 and 1908, during which Monet exhibited forty-eight Nympheas paintings at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris to considerable critical acclaim. These works marked a decisive departure from the earlier Giverny canvases that still included the Japanese bridge, the garden’s banks, and identifiable spatial coordinates. In the 1906 paintings, Monet eliminated the horizon line altogether, presenting the water’s surface as a self-contained world — a move that would have profound consequences for the future of painting.
Monet’s water garden at Giverny was itself a work of art, meticulously planned and constantly maintained as a living composition of color, form, and reflection. He purchased the property in 1883 and acquired an adjacent plot of land in 1893, diverting a branch of the Epte River to create a pond that he populated with water lilies imported from Egypt and South America. He employed a team of gardeners — at times numbering as many as six — to tend the garden, remove algae, and position the lily pads according to his precise aesthetic specifications. A Japanese-style arched bridge, inspired by the woodblock prints Monet avidly collected, spanned the pond, and weeping willows, wisteria, irises, and bamboo bordered its edges. The garden was, in Monet’s own description, his “most beautiful masterpiece,” a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art — that blurred the distinction between nature and artifice, between the motif and its representation. When painting the water garden, Monet was in effect painting a painting: a landscape he had already composed before setting brush to canvas.
Formal Analysis
The radical elimination of the horizon line in the 1906 Water Lilies canvases created a pictorial space without precedent in European painting. By focusing exclusively on the water’s surface, Monet collapsed the traditional distinction between foreground and background, between solid ground and empty sky. The water’s surface became a screen on which multiple realities coexisted simultaneously: the lily pads and blossoms floating on the surface, the reflected images of clouds, sky, and surrounding foliage, and the murky depths of the pond visible through the transparent water. This triple layering of spatial planes — surface, reflection, and depth — produced a visual field of extraordinary complexity and ambiguity. The viewer cannot fix a stable viewing position or determine a consistent spatial logic; the eye floats across the canvas much as the lilies float on the water, suspended between realities. This dissolution of spatial certainty would later be recognized as one of Impressionism’s most radical legacies, pointing directly toward the all-over compositions of mid-twentieth-century abstraction.
Monet’s technique in these paintings evolved dramatically from the broken, comma-like brushwork of his earlier Impressionist canvases. In the 1906 works, he applied paint in longer, more sinuous strokes, building up layers of color in a process of accretion that could extend over weeks or months. He frequently reworked canvases, scraping back passages and repainting them, allowing earlier layers to show through the surface in places. The palette ranges from deep viridian greens and cobalt blues in the water to delicate pinks, mauves, and creams in the lily blossoms, with passages of ochre and burnt sienna where reflected light warms the surface. The overall effect is one of luminous, shimmering atmosphere — a palpable envelope of humid air and diffused sunlight that seems to emanate from within the paint itself rather than from any identifiable light source. Monet’s friend and biographer Gustave Geffroy described the effect as “an aquatic garden seen in a mirror of water,” capturing the painting’s quality of doubled, reflected reality.
By the time Monet was painting the 1906 canvases, his vision was already beginning to be affected by the cataracts that would progressively impair his sight over the following two decades. Diagnosed in 1912, the cataracts caused a yellowing and blurring of his vision that increasingly altered his perception of color — blues became harder to distinguish, while reds, oranges, and yellows became exaggerated. Monet resisted surgery for years, terrified of losing what remained of his sight, and some scholars have argued that the evolution of his late style — the increasingly broad brushwork, the intensified warm tones, the progressive dissolution of form — can be attributed in part to his deteriorating eyesight. After finally undergoing cataract surgery on his right eye in 1923, Monet was disturbed to discover how much his color perception had shifted, and he repainted several canvases. Yet to attribute his late style entirely to pathology is reductive: the trajectory toward abstraction was already established in works like the 1906 painting, well before cataracts significantly impaired his vision. The dissolution of form was an artistic choice as much as a physiological consequence.
The crowning achievement of the Nympheas project is the suite of monumental water lily murals that Monet donated to the French state and that were installed, after his death, in two oval rooms of the Orangerie museum in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. The project originated in a conversation between Monet and his friend Georges Clemenceau, who as Prime Minister of France encouraged the artist to create a permanent, immersive environment of water lily paintings as a “monument to peace” following the armistice of November 11, 1918. Monet worked on the large-scale panels — some measuring over two meters high and up to seventeen meters long — in a specially constructed studio at Giverny from 1914 until his death on December 5, 1926. The Orangerie installation, which opened to the public in May 1927, envelops the viewer in a continuous panorama of water, light, and vegetation that anticipates the immersive installations of contemporary art. The curved walls and natural overhead light create an experience that is as much architectural and environmental as it is pictorial.
Significance & Legacy
The influence of the Water Lilies on subsequent art, particularly on American Abstract Expressionism, was profound but delayed. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Monet’s late works were largely dismissed as the embarrassing products of a blind old man in decline — formless, sentimental, and retrograde in comparison to the rigorous formal experiments of Cubism and geometric abstraction. This critical consensus began to shift in the 1950s, when painters including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell began to be discussed in relation to Monet’s late canvases. The art critic Clement Greenberg, who had championed Abstract Expressionism as the culmination of modernist painting, acknowledged Monet’s late works as crucial precursors, and the influential 1956 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by William Seitz, placed the Nympheas firmly within the narrative of modernist abstraction. The all-over composition, the dissolution of figure-ground relationships, the emphasis on pure optical sensation, and the monumental scale of the Orangerie murals all found echoes in the large-format canvases of the New York School.
Today, the Water Lilies paintings are among the most widely dispersed and universally beloved works in the history of art, with canvases held by major museums across the globe, from the Musee d’Orsay and the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Their popularity with the general public has sometimes provoked critical suspicion — a sense that paintings so easily appreciated cannot be truly radical — but this view misunderstands the nature of Monet’s achievement. The Water Lilies succeed precisely because they operate at the threshold of representation and abstraction, offering the sensory pleasure of recognizable natural beauty while simultaneously dissolving that beauty into pure fields of color and light. They are, in the deepest sense, paintings about perception itself — about the act of seeing a world that is always in flux, always dissolving and reconstituting itself on the trembling surface of consciousness.
