Why Did Monet Paint Water Lilies 250 Times? Inside the Pond That Filled His Last Decades

Monet painted about 250 Water Lilies of his Giverny pond, many with failing eyesight. Eight giant panels have filled two oval rooms in Paris since 1927.

Claude Monet painted roughly 250 Water Lilies because the pond in his own garden at Giverny gave him an endless subject: the same water, flowers and reflections changing with every hour, season and kind of light. The series became the main focus of his work during the last decades of his life, and many of the canvases were painted while cataracts were clouding his vision. The project ended in something unique in art history: eight enormous panels wrapped around two oval rooms in Paris, opened to the public a few months after his death in 1926. Here is the story of the garden, the paintings and the man who would not stop looking at one pond.

A painter who thought in series

Long before the water lilies, Monet had learned to paint the same motif again and again. His habit of working in series began in 1889, when he painted at least ten views of the valley of the Creuse. The idea was simple but radical: the subject was not really the valley, the haystack or the cathedral, but the light falling on it at a particular moment. Paint it at noon and at dusk, in summer and in frost, and you get a completely different picture.

The water lily pond would take that idea further than any of his earlier series. Here he controlled not only his viewpoint but the subject itself, because he had designed it.

Building a garden to paint

In 1883 Monet rented a house with gardens at Giverny, near Vernon in northern France, and moved in on 29 April. The property, with its barn that doubled as a studio, its orchards and a small garden, gave him the domestic stability he had lacked. In 1890 he bought the house, and during the 1890s he added a greenhouse, a second large studio lit by skylights, and extra land that included a water meadow.

That meadow became his water garden, which inspired him for about forty years. He enlarged the pond in 1901 and again in 1910, and in 1902 he extended the water garden by nearly 4,000 square metres. Easels were placed around the edge so that he could paint from different viewpoints. He planted white water lilies native to France alongside varieties imported from South America and Egypt, creating a range of colours: yellow, blue, and white lilies that turned pink as they aged.

Monet treated the garden as a work in its own right. He wrote daily instructions to his gardener, drew precise planting plans and kept his invoices for plants and botany books. As he grew wealthier he employed seven gardeners, but he remained the garden's architect.

The Japanese bridge

The first paintings of the pond were built around the arched Japanese footbridge that crossed it. In 1899 Monet began the water lily paintings that would occupy him for the rest of his life, and he first exhibited the group in 1900. Works from that year now hang in American museums, including Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge at Princeton, Japanese Footbridge at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Japanese Bridge and Water Lily Pond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Losing the horizon

Around 1905 something changed. Monet stopped painting the pond from its edges, where the bank and the bridge gave a sense of place, and moved his gaze down to the surface of the water. He also changed the shape of his canvases, from rectangles to squares and then to circles. In these pictures there is no sky and no horizon, only water, floating leaves and the reflections of clouds and trees. The viewer loses any fixed point of orientation.

The exhibition Les Nymphéas, which opened on 6 May 1909 with 48 paintings, was a success.

Grief and failing eyes

The following years were hard. His wife Alice died in 1911, and his eldest son Jean died in 1914; Monet became depressed, and Jean's widow Blanche, who was also Alice's daughter, looked after him. At the same time his eyesight was failing. In 1913 he consulted the London ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich, got new glasses and refused surgery on his right eye. Wary of operations that had gone badly for other artists, he said he would rather have poor sight, and perhaps give up painting, than lose "a little of these things that I love". He did not have the operation until 1923.

Cataracts changed his palette. His brushstrokes became broader and his paintings darker. To keep working he labelled his paint tubes, kept his palette in strict order and wore a straw hat against the glare. After surgery he saw the world with a bluish tint and struggled with his new spectacles; he destroyed some canvases from the years before the operation, saying he could now "see the real colours", and by 1925 his sight had improved enough for him to retouch earlier works, making the water lilies bluer.

A gift to France, with Clemenceau's help

In 1914, encouraged by his friend Georges Clemenceau, Monet planned a huge new studio for a "decorative cycle of paintings devoted to the water garden". Most of the work on the cycle took place between 1916 and 1921. The paintings were at first intended for the Musée Rodin, but Clemenceau, then head of the French government, wanted them in the Orangerie in the Tuileries garden, and the donation was finalised in 1922.

Monet worked out the installation with the architect Camille Lefèvre. The result is eight panels, each two metres high, running in a continuous band through two oval rooms whose plan together forms the shape of an infinity sign. Monet insisted on skylights so that the paintings would always be seen in natural light.

Opening after his death

Monet did not live to see it. He died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged 86, and was buried in the village churchyard. At the funeral Clemenceau pulled away the black cloth on the coffin, saying "No black for Monet!", and replaced it with a flowered fabric. The Orangerie rooms opened to the public in May 1927, only a few months later. A renovation between 2000 and 2006 removed later alterations and restored natural light to the panels.

Rediscovery, fire and record prices

In the 1950s Abstract Expressionist painters rediscovered Monet's late works, and a 1952 essay by André Masson helped change how they were viewed. Not every canvas survived: a fire at the Museum of Modern Art in New York destroyed water lily paintings the museum had acquired.

On the art market they became trophies. In June 2008 a Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold at Christie's in London for almost £41 million, far above its estimate, and in June 2014 another Nymphéas sold at Sotheby's in London for about $54 million. Today the series is spread across the world, from the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum and MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chichu Art Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima.

Learn with Water Lilies: English phrases about seeing and light

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to see something in a new light	to understand it differently	After the surgery he saw his work in a new light.
to lose sight of something	to forget what is important	He never lost sight of his pond.
to take a closer look	to examine more carefully	Take a closer look at the reflections.
to keep at it	to continue working hard	Despite his eyes, Monet kept at it.
a labour of love	hard work done for pleasure	The garden was a labour of love.

Try this: Look at one Water Lilies painting for two minutes. Write three English sentences about what you notice, using "take a closer look" and "see something in a new light".