Claude Monet Water Lilies Painting

Water Lilies was painted by Claude Monet in 1916. Dissatisfied with the limitations of traditional art, Claude Monet (1840-1925) founded Impressionism. Along with Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissaro, he was a groundbreaking forerunner of the movement. His serene, classic series of water lily paintings, with their dreamlike atmosphere and vivid colors, continues to provide strong inspiration for abstract artists worldwide.

The water-lily pond at Monet’s home in Giverny, north-west of Paris, became the principal motif of his later paintings. Filling the canvas, the surface of the pond becomes a world in itself, inspiring a sense of immersion in nature. Monet’s observations of the changing patterns of light on the surface of the water become almost abstract. The paintings were not fully appreciated in Monet’s lifetime, and when they were reassessed in 1950s, some critics viewed them as precursors of Abstract Expressionism.

In his effort to capture just the right amount of light and dark, Monet always worked on several canvases at once and furiously followed the changing daylight. He painted intently, disregarding all the topical trends, and declared to his astonished contemporaries, "The subject is not important to me; what I want to reproduce is what exists between the subject and me." Near the end of his life, as a result of his intense efforts to place what he painted in the proper light and shade.