Water Lilies (1906): Artwork and History

Water Lilies (1906) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Little did Claude Monet know that the water garden he created three years after buying his Giverny, France, property in 1890 would become his primary inspiration over the next two and a half decades. These paintings, numbering around 250, mark Monet’s artistic journey from more straightforward depictions of the pond spanned by the wooden Japanese bridge to the monumental and near-abstract series on the water lily theme he made in preparation for his murals at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris between 1914 and 1926. Water Lilies, one of a group of paintings on the subject made between 1903 and 1908, comes at the midpoint of Monet’s developing style and spatial experimentations. The nearly square format underscores his move away from painting the conventional zones of land, sky, and water to focus solely on the water’s surface. Clusters of water lilies at bottom left and top right frame a watery path, while the water’s surface reflects trees and clouds. Although the dreamlike quality of floating forms might seem to be a natural development for the artist, he considered these works “an obsession,” a sentiment borne out by technical examinations on the Art Institute’s canvas, revealing many significant changes made to the painting in progress.

Object facts

• Title: Water Lilies
• Date: 1906
• Artist attribution: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 89.9 × 94.1 cm (35 3/8 × 37 1/16 in.); Framed: 103.2 × 107 × 5.8 cm (40 5/8 × 42 1/8 × 2 1/4 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.1157

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.