Water Lilies 1916 By Claude Monet

Water Lilies 1916 by Claude Monet is a famous oil painting and part of his series of Water Lilies.

If you’re searching for Monet's famous paintings, it doesn’t get much more iconic than his famous paintings of Water Lilies.

Measuring just over 200 by 201 centimeters, it is one of the smaller paintings in Claude Monet's series of "Water Lilies." Despite this, it sings with exuberance and movement as it is a perfect expression of Claude Monet and the Impressionist style of painting.

Signed and dated by the artist on the lower left-hand side of the work, the painting depicts Monet’s famous lily-covered pond at his gardens in Giverny.

How many paintings of Water Lilies are there?

Claud Monet painted over 250 oil paintings as part of his Water Lilies series. Indeed, his famous paintings occupied the last decades of his life.
After his 50th birthday, Monet created his amazing and beautiful garden, devoting himself to painting it throughout the seasons. The water lily pond was a particular fascination.

Indeed, Monet employed a small brigade of gardeners to divert the nearby river, creating the pond, and surrounded it with weeping willows, exotic flowers, bamboo, and water lilies. Monet once said of his endeavors, “My finest masterpiece… is my garden”.

By 1916, Monet had been working on his Water Lilies series for twenty years. His Water Lilies 1916 painting particularly conveys the delicacy of the flowers and the shifting watery shadows, achieving a distinct combination of delicacy and boldness. Within these artistic innovations, Monet anticipated the Expressionist art movement of future years.

In this painting, Monet concentrates exclusively on the surface of the pond. He does not depict land or sky, and only occasionally shows their reflections in the shifting water.

Why did Claude Monet paint Water Lilies?

Throughout his career, Monet painted works on specific themes. The previous series included Haystacks, the Façade of Rouen Cathedral, and the paintings completed at the Valley of the Creuse.

Despite this, the water lilies at Giverny held particular allure. It’s unknown exactly why Monet chose to paint water lilies so obsessively, but the interplay of natural beauty, color, and artistic curiosity all played a part.

Speaking of the series, Monet once commented, “These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.”

Monet’s later Water Lily paintings were created after the death of his wife, Alice, in 1911. Although after this sad event, Monet’s compositions became larger, and he utilized brighter spots of colors and more expressive brushstrokes. Monet’s vibrant contrasting hues and brave painterly techniques are particularly evident in this painting.

Monet created many of the Water Lily paintings while suffering from cataracts. Cataracts are a degenerative condition affecting the eyes, where the lens becomes cloudy, reducing vision. Symptoms include blurred vision, halos around light sources, and faded colors.

These effects are evident in the progression of Monet’s paintings, with circular depictions of light and water, and altered natural colors, all set against a shifting, blurry atmosphere. Some of his latest works, for instance, Japanese Bridge (1918), make this deterioration even more apparent.

Ever since their creation, Monet’s Water Lilies paintings have remained incredibly popular. In 2007, a Water Lily painting sold for £18.5 million at Sotheby’s in London. The following year, another sold for almost £41 million at Christie's, London.

Where is Monet's Original Painting?

It was first displayed in 1924 at the “Exposition Claude Monet” at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, alongside other Claude Monet lily pad paintings, and it was an immediate success.

Monet's Water Lilies 1916 now hangs in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. It was purchased in 1921 by Kojiro Matsukata of Kobe, and has remained in Japan since that time.

Known and loved the world over, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies is one of the most famous impressionist paintings and a popular oil painting reproduction.