The archive / Impressionism / Water Lilies
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Water Lilies
Claude Monet · 1840–1926
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3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. 300 DPI · sRGB · personal-use license.
Museum-quality giclée on Hahnemühle German Etching — heavyweight 310gsm, acid-free, velvety matte. Made to order & shipped.
Sizes in the download
Ready-to-print files at every size below — each drops straight into a standard frame at 300 DPI, nothing cropped:
Each of these also prints big-wall at 150 DPI — up to about 36″ on the short side (so the 20×20″ becomes 36×36″), for a step-back view. Or print the borderless master, the full-resolution scan, sharp to about 24×24″.
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 surroundings appear only as reflections in the water. The lilies gather in the upper-right and lower-left corners, divided by a diagonal swath of open water.
Look closer
This calm surface was heavily reworked.
Technical examination shows the canvas was heavily reworked, with at least eight or nine layers of paint built up in some areas of the upper-right corner. Monet reached for a wide palette of modern pigments to do it, among them cadmium yellow, vermilion, viridian, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, and cobalt violet.
Why it matters
It was a great success in Paris.
This canvas, signed and dated in reddish-brown paint at the lower right, was first shown at Monet's landmark 1909 Durand-Ruel exhibition alongside almost fifty other paintings of the same water-lily motif. The show proved such a success that it was extended by a 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
- Open access · personal use
- File
- 300 DPI · sRGB · JPEG
