Water Lilies

This painting is one of Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas), a series of roughly 250 oil paintings of the water garden at his home in Giverny that occupied much of the last thirty-one years of his life. The version shown here is signed and dated 1907 and is held by the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (catalogue raisonné W.1714).

Monet had begun painting related subjects in series in 1889 with his views of the Valley of the Creuse; the haystacks, Rouen Cathedral and poplars followed before the water-lily pond became his dominant motif. From the late 1890s he painted the pond he had laid out at Giverny over and over, letting the water surface fill the whole canvas and recording the reflections of sky and willow at different hours. Many of the late canvases were painted while he suffered from cataracts.

Monet conceived the series on a monumental scale as well: the French state built two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie for the eight large water-lily murals he gave to the nation, opened to the public on 16 May 1927, months after his death. The Musée Marmottan Monet received the canvases left in his Giverny studio through the bequest of his son Michel in 1966, and shows the process behind the finished works.

Water Lilies now hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Musée d'Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and many other collections; sixty were assembled for a 1999 exhibition at the Orangerie. At auction they set records — Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold at Christie's London in 2008 for almost £41 million.