12 Monet Landscape Paintings Beyond the Water Lilies

Say "Monet" and most people picture the lily pond at Giverny and the Water Lilies canvases that filled his last twenty years. For most of his career, though, he was out painting harbors at dawn, snow on a farm gate, cliffs, wheatstacks and a row of poplars he had to buy because he hadn't finished painting them.

These 12 Monet landscape paintings span 1867–1897 and run in the order he painted them. Nine belong to American museums, five of them to the Met, so most of the list can be seen without a flight to Paris.

Where each one hangs

A few of them also exist as hand-painted Monet copies, linked where they come up. For Monet in bulk, though, Paris wins: the Musée Marmottan Monet holds more than 300 of his paintings, the largest collection anywhere, since his son Michel left it his own collection in 1966.

What is Claude Monet's most famous landscape painting?

The small harbor view called Impression, Sunrise (1872) is the usual answer. It shows Le Havre, Monet's hometown, through morning haze, and its title gave Impressionism its name after the critic Louis Leroy turned it into a jibe in his satirical review of the 1874 exhibition. It hangs in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

From Sainte-Adresse to the Seine at dawn

1. Garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867)

A terrace above the Channel at Sainte-Adresse, the resort near Le Havre where Monet spent the summer of 1867. The man seated in the foreground is probably his father, Adolphe. Look at the two flags: Monet called this "the Chinese painting in which there are flags," and its flat horizontal bands of color recall the Japanese woodblock prints he collected. It's at the Met.

A year earlier he had begun the tall canvas of Women in the Garden outdoors, 255 cm (100 in) high, and to paint its upper half he lowered it into a trench he'd dug.

2. The Magpie (1868–69)

A single black magpie perched on the gate of a wattle fence, in snow near Étretat. There isn't a person in sight. Look at the shadows on the snow: they're blue-violet, one of the first times Monet used colored shadows. The Salon jury turned it down in 1869. The Musée d'Orsay acquired it in 1984. It measures 89 × 130 cm (35 × 51 in).

3. La Grenouillère (1869)

A floating restaurant and boat-hire on the Seine at Croissy. Renoir painted the same scene at the same time, almost certainly at Monet's side. Find the small round islet in the middle, nicknamed the Camembert. Monet told Bazille he dreamed of a finished painting of the baths and so far had only rough sketches. A larger version, once in Berlin, is lost; the Met's canvas (74.6 × 99.7 cm) and a smaller one in London survive.

4. Impression, Sunrise (1872)

The harbor at Le Havre just after dawn: an orange sun over dark rowboats in the haze, and its reflection laid down in a few short strokes. The canvas is small, 48 × 63 cm. Asked about the title years later, Monet explained that the catalog needed one and "it couldn't really pass as a view of Le Havre, so I answered: 'Put down Impression.'" Masked gunmen took it from the Marmottan in October 1985. It turned up in a villa in Corsica in December 1990.

5. The Poppy Field near Argenteuil (1873)

Red poppies in a field near Argenteuil. Find the two pairs: a woman with a parasol and a child in the foreground, and a similar pair in the middle ground. The woman is probably Camille, Monet's wife, with their son Jean. The pairs trace a diagonal, with red ruling the left half and blue-green the right, and the nearest poppies are painted as oversized patches of color. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and has been at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986.

6. The Garden at Vétheuil (1881)

In 1878 Monet's family moved to Vétheuil and shared a house with the Hoschedés. In his picture of their sunflower garden, look for the staircase climbing between walls of sunflowers toward the house, with a blue-and-white pot on each side of the path. He painted this garden more than once in 1881. The version at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (151.5 × 121 cm) puts a small child with a toy cart on the path; another belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection in Potsdam. That December, behind on the rent, he had to leave for Poissy.

7. Cliff Walk at Pourville (1882)

Two young women on a grassy cliff top above the sea, probably Marthe and Blanche, the eldest Hoschedé daughters. Monet went to Normandy in February 1882 and stayed in the fishing village of Pourville until mid-April. He wrote to Alice Hoschedé and her children that he longed to show them every nook and cranny of the place. Look at the grass, built from short, curved strokes, then find the same strokes in the dresses and the sea. X-rays show he cut back the rock at the far right.

8. The Manneporte, Étretat (1883)

Monet was back at Étretat in 1883, this time for the rock arches. The Manneporte is the biggest of the three, and you can't see it from the town. The arch fills most of the canvas, with waves breaking through the opening. Look for the two tiny figures on the rocks at lower left, which give the arch its scale. The Met owns this 1883 view (65.4 × 81.3 cm) and a second, upright Manneporte from 1886.

9. Bordighera (1884)

A hilltop view on the Italian Riviera, near the French border. Pine trunks interlace across the picture, and the Mediterranean barely shows between them. Monet planned a three-week visit to Bordighera and stayed almost three months, from January 18 until April 5, 1884. He painted 38 pictures of its motifs. In a letter to Rodin he wrote that he was "fencing, wrestling, with the sun."

10. Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) (1890–91)

The stacks stood just outside Monet's farmhouse at Giverny and rose 15–20 feet. He worked at several easels at once in the field. In May 1891 he hung fifteen of them in one small room at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and most sold within a month. The series runs to 25 canvases, and the Art Institute of Chicago owns six, the largest group anywhere. In this end-of-summer view, the conical tops break the horizon.

11. The Four Trees (1891)

Poplars on the Epte, a few kilometers upstream from Giverny, painted from a floating studio Monet reached by small boat. The nearly square canvas (81.9 × 81.6 cm) crops the tops of the trees, so four trunks and their reflections run from edge to edge. The trees belonged to the commune of Limetz-Villez, which put them up for auction before he had finished. Monet had to buy them to keep painting, then sold them to the lumber merchant who had also wanted them.

12. Morning on the Seine near Giverny (1897)

Morning mist on the Seine near Giverny, where trees and their reflections dissolve into each other. In 1896 and 1897 Monet was up at 3:30 so that by sunrise he was already in the small boat he kept tied to a tree branch on the river. He made at least 20 of them and kept 14 canvases going at once. By 1899 he was painting the bridge over his lily pond, which the Met also owns.

How much is a real Monet painting worth?

At the very top, $110.7 million. On May 14, 2019, Meules (1890), one of the grainstacks, sold at Sotheby's in New York for $110,747,000 after six bidders fought over it for eight minutes. That set a record for Monet and for any Impressionist work, and it became the first Impressionist painting to cross $100 million at auction. It hadn't been to auction since 1986, and the 2019 price was more than 44 times its previous record.

The grainstacks sit comfortably among the other paintings nearly everyone knows by sight, if you want to keep going.

Bringing one home

If one of these belongs on your wall, Impression, Sunrise and the terrace at Sainte-Adresse both come as oil paintings made by hand. The Vétheuil garden is there too, in the version with the staircase and no figures. The rest sits in the wider set of Monet copies, where you can compare sizes and pick the one you would stop at in a museum.

Sources

• Sotheby's: Monet's Meules sells for $110.7 million
• CBS New York: Monet painting fetches record $110.7 million
• North Carolina Museum of Art: The Seine at Giverny, Morning Mists
• Musée d'Orsay on Google Arts & Culture: Poppy Field
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: collection data, The Four Trees
• Art Institute of Chicago: collection data, Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)