Claude Monet Water Lilies

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, Canvas Print, Oil Painting Replica and High Resolution Image Download

Monet's passion for documenting the French countryside led him to adopt the method of painting the same scene multiple times in order to capture the changing light and the transition of seasons. Starting in 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property, and began a large-scale landscape project that would become the subject of his most famous works, the water lily ponds.

He began painting the water lilies in 1899, first in vertical views where a Japanese bridge was a central feature, and later in a series of large-scale paintings that would occupy him for the next 20 years of his life.

The Water Lilies or Nymphéas series consists of approximately 250 oil paintings. Today, we enjoy some masterpieces from this series.

"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece."

Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and lived there until his death in 1926. With his property, he created a water garden "to cultivate water plants" and built a Japanese-style arched bridge over it.

The bridge, surrounded by lush vegetation, can be seen here amidst an artistic arrangement of reeds and willow leaves, with the pond itself.

The unusual vertical format in this series highlights the water lilies and their reflections on the pond.

"Everything I earned went into these gardens."

Being an avid gardener, Monet bought the land with the intention of creating something "for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint."

In his last decade, he painted almost exclusively the flower-filled garden he created there. The garden provided endless motifs that could be observed from various angles, with a play of ever-changing light and reflections on the water's surface.

Here, the scattered water lily leaves on the canvas suggest the surface of the water being pulled into space. The play of light and dark beneath the lilies represents the reflection of trees and the sky on a distant shore. Influenced by the delicate combination of reality and reflection, critics compared Monet's paintings in this "water landscape" series to poetry and music.

Claude Monet, referring to his water landscapes painted at his home in Giverny from 1897 to his death in 1926, said, "Nature contains everything in a single direction." From the 1870s to the 1890s, he exclusively painted the timeless motif of water lilies. The focus of these paintings was his beloved flower garden, which included a water garden with a smaller pond encompassed by a Japanese footbridge. In the first series of water lilies (1897-99), Monet painted the water garden setting with water lilies, the bridge, and a horizon neatly divided by fixed trees. Over time, the artist became less concerned with the traditional pictorial field. When he painted the Water Lilies from the third group of these works, he completely abandoned the horizon line. In this spatially ambiguous canvas, the artist looked downward, focusing only on the surface of the pond with clusters of plants floating between the reflection of the sky and the trees. Thus, Monet created the appearance of a horizontal surface on a vertical one. Four years later, he pushed the boundaries of traditional easel painting even further and began creating monumental, densely painted compositions that seemed to merge with the water.

During World War I, after several years of inactivity due to poor health and grief over his second wife's death, Claude Monet entered a period of intense work. He constructed a large studio and improved his garden, starting a group of monumental water lily paintings that he would later present to the French state. In addition to this project, he painted a series of 19 small canvases, including those already available, depicting scenes of his water garden. There is evidence that Monet designed these paintings en plein air and then reworked them in his studio, including several photographs of the artist working in his garden. However, as he reached this final stage of his career, the distinction between observation and memory in his works became intangible and perhaps even irrelevant.

"I am good for nothing except painting and gardening."

As Monet aged and experienced a decline in his vision, his artworks lost much of their representational quality and are now referred to as "Abstract Impressionism." Cézanne once said of Monet, "Just an eye, but my God, what an eye." Monet died on December 5, 1926, nearly blind, having famously expressed a greater fear of darkness than of death.