Monet's Water Lilies Trivia
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49 free Monet's Water Lilies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Monet's Water Lilies trivia quiz covers the roughly 250 paintings of his lily pond at Giverny that occupied Claude Monet for the last three decades of his life. The easy questions handle the basics: the French title Nymphéas, the village where the pond was dug, the green bridge that Julie Manet thought looked 'rather Japanese', the Paris museum built to house the great murals, and the eye disease that changed how he saw colour. From there it moves through the making of the garden itself: the marshy plot bought in 1893, the neighbours who feared his flowers would poison the stream, the diverted Ru, the six gardeners, and the pond that grew to four times its original size. The harder half is for art lovers: the 1909 exhibition of 48 canvases, the shift from rectangular to round stretchers, the Weeping Willow series painted for the war dead, Georges Clemenceau's role in steering the murals to the Orangerie, the 1923 cataract operation and the canvases Monet destroyed afterwards, the neglect of the estate after Blanche's death, the American donors who restored it, and the string of record-breaking auctions from Le Bassin aux Nymphéas to Nymphéas en fleur. If you enjoyed our Claude Monet or Impressionism quizzes, this is the deep dive on his final, greatest subject. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Water Lilies series, Claude Monet, the Fondation Claude Monet and the Musée de l'Orangerie before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Monet was a leading figure of which art movement?
Impressionism
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.
Q 02Monet promised France a group of Water Lilies paintings the day after which event?
The 1918 Armistice
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.
Q 03Roughly how many oil paintings make up the Water Lilies series?
About 250
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.
Q 04Monet's house and lily pond lie in which region of France?
Normandy
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.
Q 05Which flowering climber did Monet train over the Japanese bridge in his water garden?
Wisteria
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.
Q 06Many of the Water Lilies were painted while Monet suffered from which eye condition?
Cataracts
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.
Q 07The Orangerie, home to Monet's eight great Water Lilies murals, stands in which Paris garden?
The Tuileries
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.
Q 08The Orangerie's two oval rooms of Water Lilies are arranged to form which shape?
An infinity symbol
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'.
Q 09In 1952 the painter André Masson likened the Orangerie's Water Lilies rooms to which interior?
The Sistine Chapel
The Sistine Chapel: Masson's praise helped revive interest in murals the public had largely shunned since the rooms opened in 1927.
Q 10Which French statesman, a friend of Monet, insisted the Water Lilies murals go to the Orangerie rather than the Musée Rodin?
Georges Clemenceau
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.
Q 11Which French ruler had the Orangerie built in 1852?
Napoleon III
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.
Q 12A 1958 fire at which New York museum destroyed an 18-foot Monet Water Lilies?
The Museum of Modern Art
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.
Q 13Unlike the red bridges traditional in Japan, Monet's Japanese bridge at Giverny was painted which colour?
Green
Q 21Which fellow painter, a keen gardener and yachtsman, swapped plants and advice with Monet at Giverny?
Gustave Caillebotte
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.
Q 22Monet's 1909 show of 48 water lily paintings was held at the Paris gallery of which dealer?
Paul Durand-Ruel
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.
Q 23In 1907–08 Monet painted a handful of Water Lilies on canvases of which unusual shape?
Circular
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'.
Q 14Before his water lilies, which subject did Monet paint again and again in changing light in 1890–91?
Haystacks
Haystacks: when he hung 15 of them together in 1891, his friend Pissarro reported that every one sold soon after the doors opened.
Q 15In Monet's day, what ran between his flower garden and his water garden at Giverny?
A railway line
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.
Q 16Giverny villagers opposed Monet's plan for a lily pond in 1893, fearing his exotic plants would do what?
Poison the water
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.
Q 17Julie Manet, a teenage visitor who described Monet's new pond in her 1893 diary, was which painter's daughter?
Berthe Morisot
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.
Q 18The hybrid water lilies Monet planted were shown at the 1889 Paris world's fair, whose centrepiece was which new landmark?
The Eiffel Tower
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.
Q 19Which job kept one of Monet's gardeners busy full time?
Cleaning the lily pond
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.
Q 20Long before his lily pond, Monet studied reflections on the water at Argenteuil from what kind of studio?
A small boat
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.
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.
Q 24Which Japanese architect designed the underground Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima, home to a room of Monet's Water Lilies?
Tadao Ando
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.
Q 25Which tree by his pond did Monet paint in a sombre wartime series seen as a tribute to France's fallen soldiers?
Weeping willow
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.
Q 26Monet had the dining room of his Giverny house painted in two shades of which colour?
Yellow
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.
Q 27After his 1923 eye operation, Monet complained that everything he saw was tinted which colour?
Blue
Blue: he suffered cyanopsia, a bluish cast over everything, which lingered until his doctors covered one eye with a black lens.
Q 28Monet's cycle of huge Water Lilies murals for France is known by which name?
The Grandes Décorations
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.
Q 29Monet was still reworking the Orangerie murals in 1926, the year he died of which illness?
Lung cancer
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.
Q 30Which movement 'rediscovered' Monet's late Water Lilies in the 1950s?
The Abstract Expressionists
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.