Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryWater Lily Pond
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the floating lily pads with the deeper vertical reflections. Notice that there is no bridge or distant shoreline to orient the view.
This 1917–19 painting is a later pond view than Monet’s bridge scene of 1900. It belongs to a group of nineteen smaller canvases made alongside his monumental water-lily project for France. He developed such pictures outdoors and reworked them in the studio, bringing observation and sustained revision together.
Oil on canvas · 130.2 × 201.9 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Impressionism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Water Lily Pond
- Artist
- Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
- Date
- 1917–19
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 130.2 × 201.9 cm (51 1/2 × 79 1/2 in.); Framed: 147.4 × 218.5 × 9.9 cm (58 × 86 × 3 7/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Harvey Kaplan
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.







