Water Lilies by Claude Monet

Water Lilies at the Met is 101 × 200 cm, height by width, and every centimetre of it is water. Our hand-painted oil reproduction starts at $249.95. Number 18 in our ranking of 100 famous paintings, and one of 201 Monet canvases we paint.

Where the eye enters a picture with no horizon

Monet cut the pond on all four sides. There is no bank, no sky and no far edge to rest on. A pale lavender channel opens in the middle of the canvas. It starts narrow at the top edge and widens as it comes down. That channel is the sky, lying flat on the water as a reflection.

Two directions cross on the surface. The lily pads drift in flat horizontal rows. Down the right side the foliage above the pond falls back into it, as vertical strokes of olive and yellow green. The water reads as a plane and as depth at the same time.

Distance is handled by size alone. At the foot of the canvas a pad is a broad oval. Near the top the same pads shrink to short yellow dashes. Nothing converges, so the eye climbs the picture instead of walking into it. The palette stays narrow all the way: yellow, olive, violet grey.

Each lily pad is one open ring of paint

Stand back and the water is a single mass of colour. Come close and a pad is one curved stroke that closes an ellipse. Many of those rings are left unfilled, so the layer underneath shows through the middle.

The flowers are the smallest marks and the thickest. Coral and pink, set down in single dabs of unmixed paint. That is impasto, paint laid on thick enough to keep the ridge of the brush.

At the lower left the signature is red orange script, Claude Monet 1919, brushed wet into the green under it. Your painter matches it at the same scale as everything else.

One of nineteen pond canvases, and a quartet the dealers took at once

Between 1917 and 1919 Monet painted nineteen canvases of the pond surface alone. Five were made at 130 × 200 cm and fourteen at 100 × 200 cm. The picture in New York belongs to that second group, so the long shape is the format of the series.

He was nearly eighty and slow to part with new work. He painted this canvas and three others with the market in mind. He told his dealers, Gaston and Josse Bernheim, that he was working on them passionately. The brothers bought all four in November 1919.

What the nineteen were for is still argued. One account treats them as steps towards the large panels installed at the Orangerie in 1927. Another reads them as pictures made for the trade.

Two metres of pond, and what each square brings closer

Our seven sizes are square, from 41 × 41 cm to 152 × 152 cm. A square holds the full height of the pond and about half its width. The flowers arrive larger, and the drift of pads fills the field instead of crossing it.

Scale decides what you see. At 41 and 51 cm the ring strokes stay legible at arm's length, so those sizes hold a wall you stand near. From 91 × 91 cm upward the reflection holds the centre and the pond carries across a room.

We can also paint the shape of the original. Ask for 101 × 200 cm and we will quote it: tell us the measurements you want first.

The same pond under its footbridge is our hand-painted Japanese Bridge. The canvas that gave Impressionism its name is Impression, Sunrise.

Who paints your pond, and how the surface stays open

One artist takes the canvas from blank linen to signature, with fifteen years or more in oil. No AI generates the image, and nothing here is printed or traced.

The risk in a Monet is tidiness. Even pads and a high gloss turn water into pattern. Your painter keeps the strokes broken and the finish low, so the surface still moves up close.

You see the canvas in photographs before it ships. Ask for these three:

• 🎨 One in raking light. A lamp set to the side throws a shadow off every ridge of paint. Light straight on flattens the surface, and the ridges disappear.
• 🖌️ One close frame of the pads, taken at arm's length from the canvas. If a pad has come back as a solid oval, say so and the artist opens it again.
• 📏 One with something of known size beside it. A chair or a door works. On a screen every canvas looks the same size, and this is how 91 cm reads as 91 cm before it arrives.

What each size costs, and the facts on the label in gallery 822

Order it square, or at the full 101 × 200 cm

Prices run from $249.95 at 41 × 41 cm to $1,149.95 at 152 × 152 cm. Painting takes 2 to 5 weeks, and you approve the photographs first.

Stretching and framing sit on the selector above. For the long shape, say so in the notes before you pay.

Source: the Metropolitan Museum of Art object record for accession number 1998.325.2. See the museum record.