Water Lilies (Monet series)

Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (French: Nymphéas) is a series of around 250 oil paintings. The works show the flower garden at his home in Giverny, and they occupied most of his artistic output for the final 31 years of his life. Monet painted many of them while dealing with cataracts.

Background

Monet had a habit of creating and showing series of paintings linked by subject and viewpoint, starting in 1889 with at least ten works from the Valley of the Creuse, shown at the Galerie Georges Petit. His Haystacks is another well-known series.

In the 1920s, the French government built two oval rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie to permanently house eight large water lily murals by Monet. The exhibition opened to the public on 16 May 1927, a few months after his death. In 1999, sixty water lily paintings from around the world were gathered for a special show at the same museum.

The paintings are displayed in many museums globally, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Legion of Honor. In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston marked its 150th anniversary with some of Monet’s Water Lilies.

The paintings at auction

At auction, one of the paintings sold for £18.5 million at Sotheby’s in London on 19 June 2007. Another, Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas, went for almost £41 million at Christie’s in London on 24 June 2008, nearly double the estimate of £18 to £24 million. In May 2010, the 1906 Nymphéas was announced for auction in London in June 2010, with an estimated price of £30 to £40 million. Christie’s auction house director Giovanna Bertazzoni called the water lily paintings among the most recognized and celebrated works of the 20th century, hugely influential to later artists.

The sale took place on 23 June 2010, and bids reached £29 million, but the painting did not sell. On 6 May 2014, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold at Christie’s in New York for $27 million. In June 2014, Nymphéas sold for US$54 million at Sotheby’s in London to an anonymous buyer; it later appeared in the exhibition “Painting the Modern Garden: From Monet to Matisse” at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, starting in 2015.

Sotheby’s co-chairman Helena Newman said the result was at the top of the original estimate of $34 to $51 million. Despite these sales, about 250 oil paintings from the series remain. The collection is widely popular, with many pieces in exhibits. The paintings have been catalogued by Daniel Wildenstein in his Monet: Catalogue Raisonné.