Water Lilies

Here is Water Lilies, painted by Claude Monet, hanging in Gallery 819 at the Met in New York. Check the label for the number, it should read one nine eight three, five three two.

A quick word before you settle in. Monet worked on his water lily paintings again and again over many years, and this museum holds more than one version, so make sure the number on the wall matches what I just gave you. These canvases also tend to be large, so give yourself room to step back.

What you are looking at is a pond. Monet built it himself, in his garden at Giverny, and spent the last decades of his life painting almost nothing else. No horizon, no sky you can point to, no shoreline. Just water, and light, and the flat round leaves and blossoms floating on top.

Step close first. Let your eyes lose the flowers for a moment and just look at the paint itself, the way it sits in strokes and patches. Then back away, several steps if the room allows it, and watch the picture pull itself back together into water and light. That shift, from paint to pond and back again, is the whole experience of standing in front of this.

Here is what most people miss. They come looking for pretty flowers, and there are flowers, but the real subject is the surface of the water, and everything the water is reflecting and refusing to reflect. Monet was in his seventies when he made paintings like this one, his eyesight failing, and some say that is part of why the forms loosen and the color takes over. Look for where the water seems to hold light like it is glowing from underneath.

One thing worth knowing. By this point Monet had stopped painting the rest of the garden almost entirely. No bridge, no bank, no sky above. Just the pond, filling the whole canvas, as if he had climbed inside it.

So stand where you are. Find one patch of the canvas up close, and just watch the brushwork, not the subject. Then step back and watch it resolve. Do that once or twice, and you will have seen the painting the way Monet built it, in two very different kinds of looking.