Water-Lilies
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · After 1916
More than four metres of pond spread across the wall, with no horizon, no bank and no sky except the one reflected in the water. Lily pads drift in loose clusters of green and pink, willows hang down as violet streaks, and the surface shifts between the depths below and the clouds above. Monet painted this in his garden at Giverny when he was in his late seventies, working on huge canvases in a studio built specially for them, and it belongs to the series that ended in the great oval rooms of the Orangerie in Paris.
Come close and the picture dissolves. The paint is dragged, scrubbed and layered in long horizontal and vertical strokes, and colours that look calm from across the room turn out to be raw lilac, orange and turquoise laid side by side. Monet's eyesight was failing from cataracts, and some of the boldness of colour may come from that, but the structure is entirely deliberate: the vertical reflections of the willows hold the composition together like columns. Step back and the surface of the pond reassembles itself in front of you.
The canvas stayed in Monet's studio at his death in nineteen twenty six and passed through his son Michel before Tate bought it in nineteen sixty three. For decades it has been one of the fixed points of the collection, and a room is usually built around it, often with later abstract painting nearby to show what Monet's late work made possible. It is one of the few pictures at Tate Modern that visitors travel specifically to see, and the museum knows it: if it is off the walls, it is almost always because it has been lent for a major exhibition abroad.
Did You Know? Monet had a special studio with a glass roof built at Giverny in nineteen sixteen just so he could work on water lily canvases of this size.
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