Monet painted the Japanese footbridge over his water lily pond roughly eighteen times in the summer of 1899, and the water lilies themselves around 250 times over the last thirty years of his life. The bridge paintings are the ones most people picture, and the story behind them is largely a story about a garden he built himself.
The garden came first
Monet moved to Giverny, about fifty miles northwest of Paris, in 1883. Ten years later he bought the strip of land across the road from his house, which had a small pond on it, and set about rebuilding it.
He diverted a branch of the river Epte to feed the pond, enlarged it, planted willows, bamboo and irises around the edge, and stocked the water with lilies. Then he had a wooden footbridge built across the narrow end in the Japanese manner — he collected Japanese prints, and the influence is direct.
None of this was landscaping for its own sake. He was building a subject. As he put it himself, he was good for nothing but painting and gardening.
The bridge series, 1899
In the summer of 1899 Monet began painting the bridge, and produced around eighteen canvases in quick succession.
They share a composition, and it is a deliberately odd one. The bridge sits high across the top of the picture, there is no sky, and there is no bank in the foreground. Nothing tells you where you are standing or how far away anything is. What is left is the surface of the water, the reflections in it, and the lilies floating on top.
The versions are spread across major collections — the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris each hold one, and there are others. They are close variants rather than copies: the same view under different light, which was the point.
Who Monet was
Claude Monet was born in 1840 and died in 1926, and he is the central figure of Impressionism — not Post-Impressionism, which came after and largely in reaction to it.
He grew up in Le Havre, where Eugène Boudin persuaded him to paint outdoors and from direct observation. A stay in London in 1870 and 1871 introduced him to Turner and Constable. Back in France he worked alongside Renoir, Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, and it was Monet's own Impression, Sunrise that gave the movement its name, by way of a hostile review in 1874.
The habit that defined him was painting the same subject repeatedly under changing light — haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and finally the pond.
The Water Lilies, 1897 to 1926
The bridge canvases were the start of something much larger. Over the following decades Monet painted the pond again and again, and the paintings changed as he went.
The early ones keep a horizon and a sense of place. The later ones abandon both. There is no bank, no sky, no scale — only water, reflection and light, on canvases that grew until many were around two meters across.
The last years were hard. His second wife Alice died in 1911 and his son Jean in 1914. Cataracts progressively distorted his color vision, and he had surgery in 1923. He destroyed canvases he was unhappy with. In a letter of 1908 he wrote that these landscapes of water and reflection had become an obsession, beyond what an old man should attempt — and he kept at it for another eighteen years.
The culmination is the set of enormous curved panels he gave to the French state, installed in two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, which opened to the public in 1927, months after his death.
Why they still matter
Partly they are simply beautiful, and there is no need to complicate that. A pond at different hours, painted by someone who had looked at it for thirty years.
The other reason is what happened afterward. In the late panels the subject has almost dissolved into surface, color and mark, and mid-century painters — particularly the American Abstract Expressionists — looked hard at them for exactly that reason. Monet was not trying to make abstract paintings, and the influence is real all the same. That is much of why late Monet was reassessed upward in the 1950s, decades after his death.
Where to see them
The largest concentrations are at the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée Marmottan Monet, both in Paris. Individual canvases are held by the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and many others. Giverny itself is open to visitors, garden and bridge included.
The paintings also carry serious money — a canvas from the series sold at Sotheby's in London in 2014 for around 54 million dollars.
A few things people get wrong
- Water Lilies is a series, not a painting. Around 250 canvases carry the title.
- Nymphéas simply means water lilies. It is the botanical genus name, and the French title of the series. It does not refer to a different plant.
- The bridge is Japanese in style, not Japanese. A local craftsman built it. It has been rebuilt since.
- The reception was mixed rather than hostile. By 1899 Monet was successful and well reviewed. It was the very late work that puzzled people, and it was rehabilitated half a century later.
If it makes you want to paint water
Reflections are among the more satisfying things to paint and among the easier ones to get wrong. Two things do most of the work: reflections are generally darker and less contrasted than what they reflect, and the surface breaks them into horizontal marks rather than a mirror image. Our guide to the color wheel covers the mixing.
Ledgebay's kits are licensed artwork rather than gallery reproductions — Americana scenes, wildlife, cabins and florals — so there is no Monet in the catalog. There are water scenes and lakes in the shop, and if you have a garden or a pond of your own you can have it made into a custom paint by numbers canvas, which is closer to what Monet was doing than any reproduction would be.
