Brief Report

This large painting belongs to the famous Water Lily series, comprising some two hundred works, which Monet executed in his later years between 1898 and his death. They depict the pond in his garden at Givenchy. The painterly findings are comparable with other pictures in the series [Sagner- Düchting 1985 pp. 96-112; House 1986; Kendall 1989, p. 241]. Monet used a standard commercial pre- primed canvas which to judge by appearances he cut from the roll and stretched himself. The palette used in the picture comprises eleven different hues. According to the artist himself, in 1905 he had still made do with almost half that number, namely six: “blanc d’argent [lead white], jaune cadmium [cadmium yellow], vermillion [vermilion], garance foncée [red lake], bleu de cobalt [cobalt blue], vert émeraude [viridian], et c’est tout” [letter dated 3 June 1905, Venturi 1968, p. 404]. It already has been assumed that before starting work Monet reduced the oil content of the commercial paints [Monet 1977-1978, p. 7]. The result was a matt finish resembling pastel which has been preserved on the unvarnished picture in Cologne (fig. 1). The edges of the picture allow us to trace the way the picture was built up in layers (fig. 6). Here one can see the first relaxed brushstrokes, whose thin application of paint has nothing in common with the dense relief-like painting in the interior of the picture. It was only the constantly growing layering of individual higgledy-piggledy brushstrokes that, taken as a whole, produced the texture of the picture that we have today. Under raking light a number of deviations from the currently visible painting can be detected (fig. 4). Above all on the vegetated bank in the right-hand half of the picture, one can see the relief produced by oval brushstrokes having been painted over. These forms, which match those of the water-lily leaves, remind us that the pond originally extended further to the right. Reports suggest that Monet devoted between twenty and thirty sessions to his water-lily pictures [Sagner-Düchting 1985, pp. 98f.] Nor did he shy away from revising a picture even at the cost of spoiling it. Some of his water-lily pictures are even said to combine four or five different versions [House 1986, p. 191]. In spite of the numerous phases of work, evinced also by the picture in Cologne, it is unclear to this day whether Monet regarded the painting as finished or unfinished. Thus the bottom right-hand corner is almost totally unpainted, to an extent which the great majority of his contemporaries would surely have seen as a sign of non-completion (fig. 6). Like most of the other water-lily pictures, this one remained in the artist’s possession at first, and only sold later by his son Michel, who supplied the studio stamps recto and verso before the sale (fig. 2, 5). At the latest from 1915/16, Monet no longer signed his pictures – either because his international popularity made this unnecessary, or in order to signal their unfinished status [David 2006].

Claude Monet
Water Lilies, c. 1915/17, oil on canvas, 180.0 x 200.0 cm, WRM 3266

Claude Monet

born on 14 November 1840 in Paris,
died on 5 December 1926 in Giverny

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Reverse with studio stamp


Fig. 03

UV fluorescence


Fig. 04

Raking light, detail of centre of picture, oval relief-like brush structures dating from an earlier stage in the painting


Fig. 05

Detail of signature in bottom left-hand corner, studio stamp


Fig. 06

Detail, bottom righthand corner unfinished?


Fig. 07

Detail, right-hand (top) and left-hand (bottom) foldover edges


Fig. 08

Canvas and ground, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 09

Detail, dynamic brushstrokes


Fig. 10

Detail, overlayering of colours


Fig. 11

Red lake, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 12

Swellings of underlying paint-layers, microscopic photograph
(M = 1 mm)