The archive / Impressionism / Water Lilies
Water Lilies
Claude Monet · 1840–1926
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 24×24″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 36×36″.
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The work
Monet gives you the water and nothing else.
There is no shoreline to stand on. The painting shows the surface of Monet's water garden at Giverny, where the sky and everything around it survive only as reflections in the water. The lilies cluster in the upper-right and lower-left corners. Between them runs a diagonal swath of open water, dividing the floating pads.
Look closer
This calm surface was heavily reworked.
The stillness is hard-won. Technical examination finds at least eight or nine layers of paint stacked in places along the upper-right corner, the canvas worked and reworked. Monet reached for a wide range of modern pigments to build it up: cadmium yellow, vermilion, viridian, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, and cobalt violet. Quiet on the surface, dense underneath.
Why it matters
It was a great success in Paris.
Look to the lower right and you find the signature and date, brushed in reddish-brown paint. This canvas first hung at Monet's 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibition, set among nearly fifty other paintings of the same water-lily motif. The public came, and kept coming. The show ran so well that it was held over an extra week.
Know that I am absorbed by my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It is beyond my powers as an old man, and yet I want to arrive at rendering what I feel.— Claude Monet, in a letter to art critic Gustave Geffroy, 1908
The file & the facts
- Title
- Water Lilies
- Artist
- Claude Monet
- Year
- 1906
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 89.9 × 94.1 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · Art Institute of Chicago — Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1157 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
