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Blue Water Lilies. Claude Monet 1916 - 1919. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Paris, France. "Nymphaea" is the botanical name for a water lily. Monet grew white water lilies in the water garden...
Water Lilies (French: Nymphéas [nɛ̃.fe.a]) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life.
In his first water-lily series (1897–99), Monet painted the pond environment, with its plants, bridge, and trees neatly divided by a fixed horizon. Over time, the artist became less and less concerned with conventional pictorial space.
The huge pale picture offers an immersive experience, its surface alive and shimmering with trails of green, ochre, violet, yellow, sky blue and pink. In the years before he painted this canvas Monet experienced some tragic events that had led to a relatively fallow period in his artistic output.
The Water Lilies by Claude Monet. Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death.
Beginning in 1899, and continuing for the rest of his life, paintings of this pond were the dominant theme of Monet's art. This painting illustrates the fluid, nearly abstract style the artist developed through these water lily paintings.
This vision materialized in the form of some forty large-scale panels, Water Lilies among them, that Monet produced and continuously reworked from 1914 until his death in 1926. At this triptych’s center, lilies bloom in a luminous pool of green and blue that is frothed with lavender-tinged reflections of clouds.
