Water Lilies (Agapanthus) (c. 1915–26): Art, History and Details

Water Lilies (Agapanthus) (c. 1915–26) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A skilled horticulturalist as well as an artist, Claude Monet spent the last 30 years of his life painting the private garden he designed and helped cultivate at his home in Giverny in northern France. The resultant canvases are notable for their varied motifs, formats, and sizes. Monumental in scale, this rendering of his water lily pond focuses on the momentary effects of sunlight as it both penetrates and reflects off its shimmering surface. By zeroing in on the water and omitting its horizon and surrounding banks, Monet infers a limitless expanse—a perception amplified by the painting’s vast horizontal format that fills the viewer’s field of vision.

Object facts

• Title: Water Lilies (Agapanthus)
• Date: c. 1915–26
• Creator attribution: Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
• Culture: France, late 19th century-early 20th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 204.9 x 430.3 x 6 cm (80 11/16 x 169 7/16 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 201.3 x 425.6 cm (79 1/4 x 167 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1960.81

A detail from the museum

Water lilies were a recurring theme in Monet's work; he painted around 250 water lily compositions.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund and an anonymous gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• City Art Museum of St. Louis. Claude Monet, a Loan Exhibition. 1957.
• Sloane, J. C. "The Art of Impressionism: From Romanticism to Avant-Garde." In Romantic Art. Hilton Kramer, ed. New York: Art Digest, Inc, 1958.
• Spaeth, Eloise. American Art Museums and Galleries: An Introduction to Looking. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1960.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.