Water Lilies — The story behind it

How it came about

By 1906 Monet had stopped painting the banks of the pond and started painting only the surface of the water. There is no horizon and no shore, only reflections, and the viewer is placed directly above the pond.

Where it fits in the series

Water Lilies occupied Monet across several years, and Water Lilies belongs to the middle of that work rather than its beginning or its end. The early pictures in the group establish the motif; the late ones push it toward abstraction until the subject is barely holding the surface together.

Seen in sequence, Water Lilies is a picture in which the subject is still legible and the handling is already free. That combination is why this period of Monet's work is the most widely reproduced — it satisfies both the viewer who wants a recognisable scene and the viewer who wants paint.

The market story, briefly

Monet's market has been one of the most consistent in modern art. Works from the Water Lilies group rarely come to auction, and when they do the prices are recorded in tens of millions — a level that has more to do with scarcity and provenance than with any change in how the pictures are regarded.

That is worth knowing for one reason: the price of a reproduction has nothing to do with the price of the original. A print is priced for what it is — ink, canvas, labour and shipping.

Provenance of the original

From the artist's studio; entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933.

Reading the date

1906 is the year usually given for Water Lilies, but Monet's working method makes single dates misleading. He kept canvases in the studio for months or years, reworking them when the season came round again, and he dated pictures by when they were begun as often as by when they were finished.

This matters when you compare the Water Lilies pictures against each other. Two works dated to the same year can belong to visibly different stages of the series, because one was resolved in the field and the other was rebuilt in the studio afterwards.

The original of Water Lilies is in the collection of Art Institute of Chicago. We are not affiliated with the museum, and no museum endorsement is implied.