A Life Reflected in Water

Few themes in the history of modern art are as universally revered as Claude Monet’s Nymphéas. More than a mere series of paintings, the water lilies became the culmination of a lifetime of observation, devotion, and artistic evolution. They stand today not only as a masterwork of Impressionism but as an enduring symbol of modernity and inner vision.

The Genesis of the Water Garden (1883–1893)

The story begins in April 1883, when Monet moved to the village of Giverny with Alice Hoschedé and their combined family of eight children. Nestled at the confluence of the Seine and the Epte, Giverny was then a quiet hamlet of 300 inhabitants. The family rented—and later, in 1890, purchased—a large pink house called Le Pressoir, set on two acres of land. “Certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” Monet wrote to his dealer Durand-Ruel, he resolved to turn his surroundings into a personal Eden.

A passionate gardener since youth, Monet immediately began transforming the grounds. He replaced the vegetable plots with flowerbeds in what would become the Clos Normand. In 1893, emboldened by commercial success, Monet acquired an adjacent parcel of land and applied for permission to dig a pond “for the pleasure of the eyes and also for the purpose of having subjects to paint.” Despite protests from local farmers, who feared foreign plants would poison their cattle, the request was granted.

“Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens,
I do not deny that I am proud of them.”

That same year, he created his now-iconic lily pond—a thousand square meters of aquatic paradise graced by irises, agapanthus, cherry trees, bamboo, and the Japanese bridge that would become a recurrent motif.

Planting Before Painting (1893–1897)

Despite the garden’s grandeur, Monet did not immediately begin painting the lilies. Between 1893 and 1897, he painted only three views of the pond—hesitant beginnings that suggest he was still observing, allowing the landscape to mature before attempting to translate its elusive beauty onto canvas.

“It took me a long time to understand my water lilies. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation—how wonderful my pond was—and reached for my palette.”

By 1897, this moment of epiphany arrived. That same year, Monet completed Matinée sur la Seine, a contemplative series of dawn views along the river. These explorations of light, reflection, and atmosphere unlocked a new way of seeing, and soon, his gaze turned inward—downward—onto the surface of his own pond.

The First Nymphéas Series (1897–1909)

Between 1904 and 1909, the artist worked with almost unbroken intensity, producing more than sixty paintings of the water garden. Eschewing traditional perspective, he lowered his gaze to the surface of the pond, yielding a dazzling and radically destabilized vision of shifting, disintegrating forms; the world beyond the plane of the water exists only as the most ephemeral reflections.

“The water-flowers themselves are far from being the whole scene. Really, they are just the accompaniment. The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.”

When these works were exhibited in May 1909, they were met with critical astonishment. Jean Morgan, writing for Gil Blas, declared, “His vision increasingly is simplifying itself… to amplify, to magnify the impression of the imponderable.” Monet could not have hoped for a warmer response. And yet, the years that followed were marked by personal tragedy: the deaths of his wife Alice and son Jean, the onset of cataracts, and flooding that damaged his gardens. “I am going to pack up my colors for good,” he lamented to his stepdaughter Blanche in 1911.

The Great Project: Les Grandes Décorations (1914–1926)

Monet’s creative spirit rekindled in 1914. “I have thrown myself back into work,” he wrote, “so much so that I am getting up at four a.m. and am grinding away all day long.” Inspired by a vision he had shared as early as 1897—a circular space enveloped in panoramic views of the pond—he now committed fully to the monumental project that would become Les Grandes Décorations.

In painting his larger panels for the Grandes décorations, Monet worked in his newly-built studio, specially designed and constructed in 1915 despite the ravages and privations of the First World War, a mark of his passion for the project. While Monet could work on the largest canvases indoors in the studio all year long, come rain or shine, the ‘smaller,’ more manageable pictures like Le bassin aux nymphéas would often be propped up with an arrangement of ropes and weights so that he could paint them before the pond itself. An insight into this process was provided by René Gimpel, who wrote of a visit he made to Monet’s studio in 1918, mentioning a group of pictures that Daniel Wildenstein stated almost certainly included Le bassin aux nymphéas:

Working with mural-sized canvases, many over two meters in width, Monet embraced a new scale and boldness. Gone was the compositional restraint of the earlier Nymphéas; in its place came sweeping, expressionistic brushwork, daring color, and emotional immediacy. “Monet often made these paintings sites of contention,” wrote Paul Tucker, “pitting order against balance, and forcing forms and reflections into spaces that might otherwise be lulling and seductive.”

At the height of World War I, Monet painted furiously while his stepson fought at the front. Refusing to abandon Giverny, he vowed: “I shall die in front of my canvases, in front of my life’s work.” The paintings became both personal refuge and patriotic offering. “It occupies me enough so that I don’t have to think too much about this terrible, hideous war,” he confided.

In 1918, the day after the Armistice, Monet wrote to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau offering the completed panels as a gift to the nation. “It’s little enough, but it’s the only way I have of taking part in the victory.” Installed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1927, shortly after his death, Les Grandes Décorations represent the crowning achievement of his career.

Legacy

Monet’s late water lily paintings remained largely unseen until after World War II. When Alfred H. Barr, Jr., acquired one for MoMA in 1955, it marked a turning point. American Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko saw in Monet’s late work a kindred freedom—a liberation of form and sensation. “Monet taught me to understand what a revolution in painting can be,” declared André Masson. “Only with Monet does painting take a turn. He bestows absolute poetry on color.”

Monet’s Nymphéas are more than depictions of a pond—they are symphonies of vision, meditations on light, color, and time. In their presence, we are invited to see not only the world as Monet saw it, but as we might perceive it ourselves: fluid, fleeting, and infinitely luminous.

You will find below auction results for paintings from this iconic series, in decreasing order of price realized. Nympheas en fleur, a painting dated 1914-1917, sold at Christie’s in New-York, on 7 May 2018, for USD 84,867,500, the highest price achieved at auction for the series. The top 10 most expensive paintings from the series all sold for over USD 50 million except one, and generated a cumulative turnover of USD 634,248,860.

#1. Nymphéas en fleur, circa 1914-1917

Christie’s New-York: 7 May 2018
Estimate on Request
USD 84,687,500

Claude Monet (1840-1926), Nymphéas en fleur | Christie’s

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Nymphéas en fleur, circa 1914-1917
Oil on canvas
160.3 x 180 cm (63 x 70 7/8 inches)
Stamped with signature ‘Claude Monet’ (Lugt 1819b; on the reverse)

Monet’s late Nymphéas took a motif that he had long adored and lent them a new scale and a new vigour. Le bassin aux nymphéas has an expressionistic flair that was less evident in his pre-1914 paintings which had evolved over the intervening half decade. The word ‘décoratif’ which was used in association with these works was less because of an inherent decorative quality, but instead because of the sheer modernity of these engaging and absorbing visions: it was a result of the subjective means of rendering the scene, which viewers felt was less linked than most art with the real world. Pictures such as Le bassin aux nymphéas were almost abstract, rather than realist, and therefore were considered décoratifs.

#2. Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919

Christie’s London: 24 June 2008
Estimated: GBP 18,000,000 – 24,000,000
GBP 40,921,250 / USD 80,588,542

Claude Monet (1840-1926) , Le bassin aux nymphéas | Christie’s

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919
Oil on canvas
100.4 x 201 cm (39 1/2 x 79 1/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Claude Monet 1919’ (lower right)

Monet had begun a new series of large-scale Nymphéas in 1914, and these would lead ultimately to his Grandes décorations, the celebrated frieze now in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. The large scale and bold, almost abstracted expressionistic brushwork that characterised those works is equally evident in Le bassin aux nymphéas; these qualities would later come to have a lasting influence on a range of artists including Pierre Bonnard, the Abstract Expressionists and even the ideas behind Informel. Dated 1919, when Monet signed the picture and sold it with three sister-works to Bernheim-Jeune in November that year, Le bassin aux nymphéas is one of the tiny handful of pictures from this period that he relinquished, as he tended to view his paintings of water lilies as a large, cumulative work in progress and guarded them all jealously, seldom allowing them to leave his studio. This, then, is not a study, like so many other works from this period, but instead a highly finished work. The rarity of Le bassin aux nymphéas is reflected by the fact that of its three fellow paintings, one is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, while another was sold from the estate of Ralph Friedman at Christie’s in New York in 1992 for the then impressive price of $12,100,000; and the fourth was sadly cut into two (becoming W1893/1 and W1893/2).

The provenance of Le bassin aux nymphéas itself speaks of its exceptional importance as, before becoming the centrepiece of the formidable collection assembled by J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller, it was owned by Mr and Mrs Norton Simon. The founder of the Norton Simon Foundation that would come to give the celebrated Pasadena museum his name, Norton Simon was an immensely successful and philanthropic businessman whose private collection included a string of paintings by artists including Degas, Picasso and Van Gogh.

#3. Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1917-1919

Christie’s New-York: 9 November 2023
Estimate on Request
USD 74,010,000

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) (christies.com)

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1917-1919
Oil on canvas
100.1 x 200.6 cm (39 3/8 x 78 7/8 inches)
Stamped with signature ‘Claude Monet’ (Lugt 1819b; lower right)
Stamped again with signature ‘Claude Monet’ (Lugt 1819b; on the reverse)

Absorbing and expressionistic, with an extraordinary play of impasto and vibrant brushwork, Le bassin aux nymphéas is a key example from this famed series of works dedicated to the water lilies, executed on a large-scale canvas that stretches over two meters across. At once searingly modern and timeless, the painting focuses on the play of silvery light and the intricate dance of reflections across the lily-pond, conveying a vivid sense of the undulations of the surface of the water and the delicate bobbing flowers, as they shift and change in response to their surroundings.

Dating from 1917-1919, Le bassin aux nymphéas  hails from an important period of renewal and experimentation in Monet’s painterly visions of the lily-pond, spurred on by his desire to create mural-scale images of the motif, rather than the smaller paysages d’eau that he had hitherto painted of his gardens. These grand, monumental depictions were filled with gestural, vigorous bolts of color that coalesce to form the watery landscape, the vibrancy and gestural quality of the brushwork revealing the impressive energy that lay behind the artist’s paintings, even at this late stage of his career. Though these revolutionary compositions initially met with mixed reactions from Monet’s contemporaries, they found favor among a younger generation of artists and collectors in later decades of the twentieth century, most notably among the painters of the bourgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. Held in the same family collection for the past fifty years, Le bassin aux nymphéas is a captivating example from this great body of work, encapsulating Monet’s searing, prescient creative vision.

In Le bassin aux nymphéas, Monet’s innate ability to organize his sensations of the transience of natural phenomena is readily apparent. Here, he focusses principally on the surface of the water, stripping out all superfluous details, allowing the quicksilver-like water to fill the canvas, only interrupted by small constellations of floating water lilies. The flowers themselves are rendered with layers of rich impasto to give them a sculptural presence, affirming their position on the top of the pond, while in the watery areas, layers of color are laid on top of one another to suggest the refractions of light and the changing hues in the pond’s depths. It is the surface of the pond itself that captivates the artist’s imagination, rippling with the reflections of the willow trees that line the water’s edge as well as the slivers of intense, deep, lush lapis-colored sky above. While Monet has tightly focused his view on a small sliver of the vast pond, creating a closely framed composition that seemingly allows for no foreground or background, he has nonetheless used the water as a portal of sorts, allowing a complex interplay of the near and the far, in which the world beyond the pond exists in mirror-image.