Water Lilies

This is an oil painting on canvas, nearly square, a little under a metre on each side. It shows the surface of a pond and almost nothing else. There is no bank, no sky and no horizon. Blue and green fill the whole picture, and the water seems to stretch right to the edges of the frame. Floating on it are clusters of water lilies, which are plants with round leaves and flowers that rest on the water. Claude Monet painted it in 1906, in France.

Start with the water lilies at the bottom left. Then let your eyes travel across to the top right, where a second cluster sits. Together they frame a watery path of open water running between them. Look closely at that path. The surface reflects trees and clouds, so the sky is not painted as a separate band above. It appears in the water itself. Notice how the reflections and the floating plants blend, so it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

Monet bought his property at Giverny, France, in 1890. Three years later he created a water garden there, and it became his main inspiration for the next two and a half decades. He painted around 250 pictures of it. This one belongs to a group on the subject made between 1903 and 1908. Scientific examination of the canvas has revealed many significant changes made while he was working. Monet called these works an obsession, and the layers beneath the surface seem to bear that out.

This painting comes at the midpoint of Monet's changing style. Earlier pictures of the pond showed more ordinary views, including the wooden Japanese bridge that crosses it. Here he has dropped the usual zones of land, sky and water to focus only on the water's surface. The nearly square format helps with that. Later he would make huge, almost abstract water lily paintings, which he prepared for murals in Paris. Look once more at the reflected clouds, and ask yourself whether you are looking down at water or up at sky.