Where Can You See Monet’s Water Lilies?

Claude Monet spent the last three decades of his life painting one subject over and over: the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. The good news for the rest of us is that he was prolific, so you don't have to travel far to stand in front of a real one.

How many Water Lilies did Monet paint?

Monet painted around 250 "Water Lilies" over roughly the last thirty years of his life. He dug the pond himself, diverting a stream and planting the lilies, then painted them obsessively as the light and seasons shifted — a private garden turned into a lifelong studio.

The later canvases grew huge and increasingly abstract, the horizon dropping away until only water, sky-reflection, and floating blossoms remain. He kept at them even as cataracts clouded his sight, and part of the series' strange, glowing color comes from those failing eyes. Because he returned to the same pond in every light and season, no two are quite alike — a morning haze, a stormy afternoon, the pink of dusk all live in different canvases.

Where are the most famous ones?

The most overwhelming are in Paris. At the Musée de l'Orangerie, eight enormous panels wrap around two oval rooms Monet designed himself, so you stand inside the pond rather than in front of it. He gave them to France as a kind of public sanctuary after the First World War.

Beyond Paris, single canvases are scattered across great museums, and several are in the United States:

• The Art Institute of Chicago holds a luminous 1906 pond among its Monet rooms.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has several from across the series.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art owns a monumental Water Lilies (Agapanthus).

Monet also painted the little green Japanese footbridge arching over the same pond, a companion motif you'll often find hanging nearby.

Can you see them online?

Yes — because so many "Water Lilies" live in open-access collections, you can browse them right now. Several of the museums above share high-resolution images, and you can compare the Chicago, Cleveland, and Met ponds side by side on DiscoverArt without leaving your chair.

That's a good way to plan a trip, too. If you want the full story of Monet and this final, all-consuming obsession, start with who Claude Monet was, then react to a few lily paintings and see which pond pulls you hardest before you book the flight to Paris.