Water Lilies
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · 1916
Two metres square, the canvas is nothing but water. There is no horizon, no bank, no sky except the sky reflected in the pond. Clusters of lilies float across the surface in pink and white, and between them the water shifts from deep blue to violet to a green that might be the reflection of willows. It takes a moment to work out which way is up. Monet painted this at Giverny in 1916, in the huge studio he had built to work on his water lily canvases, when he was seventy six years old and his eyesight was already failing.
Stand back and the pond settles into place; step close and the picture falls apart into strokes. Look at the way a single lily is made of three or four dabs of thick paint laid over a thinner wash, and how the reflections are dragged in long vertical strokes that run against the horizontal drift of the flowers. There is almost no drawing. Everything is colour placed next to colour, and the edges of the canvas cut the composition arbitrarily, as though the pond continued forever beyond the frame. This is the road from Impressionism toward abstraction, and painters like Rothko and Pollock would later say so.
Kojiro Matsukata bought the painting directly from Monet in 1921, on a visit to Giverny arranged by the museum director Leonce Benedite. The two men reportedly got on well, and Matsukata came away with more than a dozen canvases. Like the rest of his collection it was seized in France during the war and returned to Japan in 1959, and it has been the most visited painting in this museum ever since. Sit on the bench opposite and let it blur.
Did You Know? Matsukata was one of the very few collectors Monet allowed to buy paintings straight out of his studio, and the two are said to have bonded over their fondness for gardens.
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