Painting
Water Lilies (Agapanthus)
Claude Monet
c. 1915–26
From the archive
A skilled horticulturalist as well as an artist, Claude Monet spent the last 30 years of his life painting the private garden he designed and helped cultivate at his home in Giverny in northern France. The resultant canvases are notable for their varied motifs, formats, and sizes. Monumental in scale, this rendering of his water lily pond focuses on the momentary effects of sunlight as it both penetrates and reflects off its shimmering surface. By zeroing in on the water and omitting its horizon and surrounding banks, Monet infers a limitless expanse—a perception amplified by the painting’s vast horizontal format that fills the viewer’s field of vision.
- Associated place
- France
- Material & technique
- oil on canvas
The record behind the work
Place & date
The museum gives the cultural attribution “France, late 19th century-early 20th century”. The pin represents this broad cultural association, not a verified creation site or depicted location.
The archive gives an approximate date or a range of years. The timeline uses that same range.
Source & reuse
Cleveland Museum of Art ↗
Source ID: 136510
CC0 — image and metadata released under the Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access program. Published from the United States.
