49 Fun Facts About Monet's Water Lilies

Monet was a leading figure of which art movement?

Impressionism began as an insult: critic Louis Leroy mockingly headed his 1874 review 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists' after Monet's harbour scene Impression, Sunrise, and the painters adopted the name.

Monet promised France a group of Water Lilies paintings the day after which event?

The 1918 Armistice: on 12 November he wrote to his friend the prime minister offering two panels as a monument to peace, a gift that grew into the Orangerie murals.

Roughly how many oil paintings make up the Water Lilies series?

About 250 is the usual count, though the Orangerie puts it nearer 300, and there would be more had Monet not destroyed canvases that failed to satisfy him.

Monet's house and lily pond lie in which region of France?

Normandy: Giverny was a small farming village when Monet rented a house there in 1883, and the garden he made now draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

Which flowering climber did Monet train over the Japanese bridge in his water garden?

Wisteria: Monet added an arched framework above the bridge to carry it, so the bridge in his paintings from 1918 on wears a canopy of blooms that the 1899 views lack.

Many of the Water Lilies were painted while Monet suffered from which eye condition?

Cataracts muddied his colours so badly that he labelled his paint tubes and kept them in strict order on his palette, yet he refused surgery until 1923.

The Orangerie, home to Monet's eight great Water Lilies murals, stands in which Paris garden?

The Tuileries: Monet never saw the murals hung there, refusing to part with them while he lived, so the rooms opened in May 1927, five months after his death.

The Orangerie's two oval rooms of Water Lilies are arranged to form which shape?

An infinity symbol: the two linked ovals trace the sign in plan, a fitting home for murals Monet said should give 'the illusion of an endless whole'.

In 1952 the painter André Masson likened the Orangerie's Water Lilies rooms to which interior?

The Sistine Chapel: Masson's praise helped revive interest in murals the public had largely shunned since the rooms opened in 1927.

Which French statesman, a friend of Monet, insisted the Water Lilies murals go to the Orangerie rather than the Musée Rodin?

Georges Clemenceau: at Monet's funeral he pulled the black pall off the coffin, declaring 'No black for Monet!', and replaced it with a flowered cloth.

Which French ruler had the Orangerie built in 1852?

Napoleon III wanted a winter shelter for citrus, so the side facing the river is glass to catch the sun while the north wall is almost blank against the cold.

A 1958 fire at which New York museum destroyed an 18-foot Monet Water Lilies?

The Museum of Modern Art: firefighters breaking in through the windows wrecked the canvas, and MoMA bought the three-panel Water Lilies it shows today as its replacement.

Unlike the red bridges traditional in Japan, Monet's Japanese bridge at Giverny was painted which colour?

Green: a local craftsman built the bridge in 1893, and within months the teenage diarist Julie Manet was describing 'a green bridge which looks rather Japanese'.

Before his water lilies, which subject did Monet paint again and again in changing light in 1890–91?

Haystacks: when he hung 15 of them together in 1891, his friend Pissarro reported that every one sold soon after the doors opened.

In Monet's day, what ran between his flower garden and his water garden at Giverny?

A railway line: Monet had to cross the tracks and a road to reach his pond, which is why visitors today are sent through an underpass instead.

Giverny villagers opposed Monet's plan for a lily pond in 1893, fearing his exotic plants would do what?

Poison the water: they feared for the cattle that drank downstream, and the council refused Monet until the prefect of the Eure overruled it three months later.

Julie Manet, a teenage visitor who described Monet's new pond in her 1893 diary, was which painter's daughter?

Berthe Morisot had married Édouard Manet's brother Eugène, and she brought their only child to Giverny that October, when the water garden was barely months old.

The hybrid water lilies Monet planted were shown at the 1889 Paris world's fair, whose centrepiece was which new landmark?

The Eiffel Tower: breeder Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac sent his new coloured hybrids to the fair, where Monet is thought to have seen them before ordering plants for his own pond.

Which job kept one of Monet's gardeners busy full time?

Cleaning the lily pond: one gardener did little else, and Monet even paid to have the road beside his water garden tarred to stop dust settling on the flowers.

Long before his lily pond, Monet studied reflections on the water at Argenteuil from what kind of studio?

A small boat: Monet used it as a floating studio so he could paint light and upside-down reflections from the river itself, the fascination that later filled his pond canvases.

Which fellow painter, a keen gardener and yachtsman, swapped plants and advice with Monet at Giverny?

Gustave Caillebotte had once kept Monet afloat by buying his canvases and paying his studio rent; by the 1890s the two were trading plants as fellow garden obsessives.

Monet's 1909 show of 48 water lily paintings was held at the Paris gallery of which dealer?

Paul Durand-Ruel had backed Monet since they met in London, where the painter had fled the Franco-Prussian War, and he got this show only after Monet had destroyed the canvases that dissatisfied him.

In 1907–08 Monet painted a handful of Water Lilies on canvases of which unusual shape?

Circular: Monet gave one of these rare round canvases to the museum in Vernon, the town across the river from Giverny, where it still hangs.

Which Japanese architect designed the underground Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima, home to a room of Monet's Water Lilies?

Tadao Ando sank the museum into the earth of Naoshima island as a place to 'rethink the relationship between nature and people', with Monet one of only three artists shown.

Which tree by his pond did Monet paint in a sombre wartime series seen as a tribute to France's fallen soldiers?

Weeping willow: Monet had painted ten of them by 1919, refusing to leave Giverny even when he could hear the guns and with his son Michel at the front.

Monet had the dining room of his Giverny house painted in two shades of which colour?

Yellow: Monet picked it to show off his china and had the kitchen next door tiled in a cool contrasting shade, so the two rooms would harmonise through the open door.

After his 1923 eye operation, Monet complained that everything he saw was tinted which colour?

Blue: he suffered cyanopsia, a bluish cast over everything, which lingered until his doctors covered one eye with a black lens.

Monet's cycle of huge Water Lilies murals for France is known by which name?

The Grandes Décorations: Monet imagined them as the decoration of one room, a continuous panorama of water and flowers surrounding the viewer, years before any building was offered.

Monet was still reworking the Orangerie murals in 1926, the year he died of which illness?

Lung cancer killed him that December at 86 with the murals still in his studio, so France received them only afterwards and unveiled them the following May.

Which movement 'rediscovered' Monet's late Water Lilies in the 1950s?

The Abstract Expressionists: painters such as Pollock and Rothko saw their own vast, all-over canvases foreshadowed in his, and collectors began buying the big panels left in his studio.

A 2013 New York trial centred on a $32 million Monet lily-pond painting sold by an aide to which former first lady?

Imelda Marcos had acquired the 1899 footbridge view while her husband ruled the Philippines; her debt-ridden former secretary sold it to a Swiss buyer, and Manila wanted it back.

To add colour to his pond, Monet imported water lilies from South America and which North African country?

Egypt: the water lilies native to France bloomed only in white, so Monet bought new hybrids and exotics to fill the pond with yellows, pinks and violets.

The River Epte, whose side stream fed Monet's lily pond, joins which major river near Giverny?

The Seine: when it flooded in 1910 the water garden went under, and Monet rebuilt the pond afterwards into the shape it keeps today.

Nymphéas en fleur set a new Monet auction record in 2018 when sold from the collection of which family?

The Rockefellers: David and Peggy Rockefeller hung it by the staircase of their country house, and their whole collection was sold for charity after his death.

What happened when the 1906 Nymphéas was offered at Christie's in June 2010 with a £30-40 million estimate?

It failed to sell: bidding stalled at £29 million, short of the price the seller wanted, and there were gasps in the London saleroom when no buyer emerged.

When restorers reached Monet's derelict Giverny studio in 1977, what was growing up through it?

Trees: three had taken root in the big studio during thirty years of neglect, and the lily pond was so choked that it had to be dug out again.

Blanche Hoschedé, who cared for Monet in his last years, was his stepdaughter and also what other relation?

His daughter-in-law: Blanche married Monet's elder son Jean in 1897, and after Jean died in 1914 she ran the household, then kept the house and garden going until 1947.

To which body did Monet's son Michel bequeath the Giverny estate on his death in a 1966 car crash?

The Académie des Beaux-Arts still owns Monet's house and gardens; it began restoring the neglected estate in 1977, eleven years after Michel's death.

Gérald Van der Kemp, who led the rescue of Monet's Giverny from 1977, had made his name restoring which palace?

Versailles: as the palace's chief curator he had set up a fundraising foundation to restore it, and he simply widened its brief to cover Monet's house and garden.

Monet's derelict house and gardens reopened in 1980 thanks largely to donors from which country?

The United States: American donors paid for most of the restoration, a century after American collectors had first made Monet rich.

Michel Monet left the paintings he inherited from his father to which Paris museum?

The Marmottan: the bequest turned a quiet museum of Napoleonic furniture into the largest Monet collection anywhere, and in 1985 gunmen walked out with nine of its paintings in daylight.

Which street artist's Show Me the Monet dumps shopping trolleys and a traffic cone in the lily pond?

Banksy painted it in 2005 as a jab at consumer waste, and in 2020 the joke itself fetched more than £7.5 million at auction in London.

Born in Paris, Monet spent his childhood in which Channel port?

Le Havre: as a teenager he made his first money there selling caricatures, until the local painter Eugène Boudin took him outdoors to paint from nature.

The Orangerie hangs its Water Lilies in an order that follows which natural cycle?

The sun's daily course: sunrise tones hang at the eastern end and dusk at the western, in a building that itself lies along the sun's east-west path.

A 1960s remodelling of the Orangerie robbed the Water Lilies of what, restored only in 2006?

Natural light: an upper floor built over the rooms for another collection blocked the skylights Monet had insisted on, and it took a six-year rebuild to remove it.

Where was Monet buried after his death at Giverny in December 1926?

In the village churchyard: Monet had insisted on a simple funeral, so only about fifty people attended, and the family grave is still there beside Giverny's church.

Before Monet's murals arrived, the Orangerie hosted concerts, banquets and shows of which animals?

Dogs: the hall was still staging dog shows when the state set it aside in 1921 as a showcase for living artists, only for Monet's murals to be given the space instead.

Which London museum bought Monet's 1899 bridge view The Water-Lily Pond the year after he died?

The National Gallery bought it in 1927 and added one of the four-metre late canvases in 1963, so London can show the pond at both ends of Monet's obsession.

Which author of Brunelleschi's Dome told the story of Monet's Water Lilies in Mad Enchantment?

Ross King opens in 1914 with a widowed, grieving Monet being coaxed back to his easel by a friend as war arrives, and the book won Canada's RBC Taylor Prize.