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One of the leading figures of the French impressionist movement, Claude Monet (1840–1926) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, the national art school in Paris. Studying under Eugène Boudin, Monet was introduced to the practice of “plein-air” painting, which played a key role in the emergence of impressionism. In 1873, Monet and colleagues such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley co-founded the “Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, et graveurs.” The group’s first exhibition in 1874 featured Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (1872), the style of which was mockingly described as “impressionism” by art critic Louis Leroy. This term was eventually adopted as the name of Monet’s group of artists and their highly influential style of painting.
Monet presented his works at five different impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Starting in the 1890s, he produced several series of paintings in which he explored how the same subject changed with varying lighting conditions, such as Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and Water Lilies. In his later years, Monet continued to paint in the impressionist style, even as he lost much of his eyesight to cataracts.
From 1883 until his death in 1926, Monet lived in Giverny, a small village near Paris. During this time (commonly known as the “Giverny period”), Monet produced around 250 paintings of water liliesfrom a pond at his home, including The Water-Lily Pond. At first, Monet painted the water lilies along with a Japanese-style bridge and the surrounding willow trees, providing a relatively detailed depiction of the entire garden. But in the 1910s, his works underwent significant changes due to his deteriorating eyesight and several personal tragedies, including the deaths of his wife Alice in 1911 and hisson Jean in 1914. In 1916, Monet opened a new studio and started painting on huge canvases measuring over 2 metersin length. He filled these canvases with the blurred or rippled reflections of water lilies, leaves, and other water plants on the surface of the pond, foregoing any background elements and leaning towards abstraction. In this particular painting, Monet focused solely on the surface of the water and the water lilies, layering the long horizontal canvas with shades of white, green, and purple. The surrounding landscape and horizon has been entirely omitted,showing the artist’s intention to depict only the reflected light on the water in a two-dimensional composition.
