Water Lilies - Claude Monet (ca. 1915–1926)

Claude Monet

Oil on canvas

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

This monumental oil painting depicts Monet's beloved Japanese-inspired water garden at Giverny, rendered in shimmering greens, blues, pinks, and purples — with no horizon line, no sky, and no banks to anchor the viewer, only an endless, dream-like expanse of reflected light and floating blooms. It is the right-hand panel of the Agapanthus Triptych, a three-part masterwork whose other panels reside at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was conceived as an immersive decorative installation meant to envelope viewers in meditative calm. Monet, the defining master of French Impressionism, spent the last decades of his life obsessively reworking these enormous canvases in a specially built studio at Giverny, continuously revising their compositions well into his eighties. Displaying this work brings into your home a piece of one of art history's most iconic and contemplative series — a painting that helped ignite the Abstract Expressionist movement and continues to captivate audiences worldwide.