Water Lilies

On a nearly square canvas about two meters on each side, there is no bank and no sky, only the surface of the pond. Lily pads and red and yellow blossoms cluster at the top and bottom of the picture, and between them the blue-violet water and the green reflections on it are joined by vertical sweeps of the brush. The flowers and shadows are not drawn in detail but built up through layers of color. The signature and the date 1916 appear at the lower left.

After the age of fifty, Monet laid out a garden at his home in Giverny, near Paris, and grew water lilies in its pond. The water, whose appearance changed with the weather and the hour, became an inexhaustible subject, and by 1916, when this work was painted, he had already been painting water lilies for some twenty years. Its bold treatment, which dispenses with form, also points toward later Expressionism and abstract painting.

Around December 1921, the businessman Matsukata Kojiro bought this work from Monet himself. It was seized by the French government in 1944, during World War II, and returned from France to Japan in 1959, entering the National Museum of Western Art that same year. The museum was opened following the return of this Matsukata Collection.