Water Lilies

Water Lilies, painted by Claude Monet, made in nineteen nineteen. You will find it here at the Met, in Gallery eight twenty two, and the number on the label is nineteen ninety eight point three two five point two.

One thing to know before you settle in front of it. Monet painted water lilies again and again in his last decades, so this museum, like several others, holds more than one. Check the label to be sure this is the canvas in front of you, and expect other visitors drawn to it too, since large late Monets tend to gather a crowd.

What you are looking at is a stretch of water, a pond, with lily pads floating on the surface. There is no horizon, no sky you can point to, no edge of the pond visible. Monet has tipped the whole world down onto the water and left you floating in it.

Now use your body. Stand close first. See how the paint stops being lilies and pads up close and becomes just paint, stroke after stroke, laid down loose and fast. Then step back, several paces if the gallery allows it, and watch the same strokes gather themselves back into water, into light, into flowers. That shift, from mark to image, is the whole experience of this picture.

Look, too, for where the color goes cool and where it goes warm. That is often how Monet built depth here, not with lines, but with temperature.

Here is what most people miss standing this close. Monet was going blind while he painted these, his eyesight clouded by cataracts for years before he had them treated. So some of what looks like freedom in the brushwork was also necessity. He was painting partly by memory and by feel.

He worked on canvases like this one at his garden in Giverny, in France, where he had dug and planted the very pond he kept returning to paint.

So stand where you are. Let your eyes soften rather than hunt for detail. Find one patch of water that pulls you in, and stay with it a moment before you move to the next painting.