Beautiful Paintings - The White Water Lilies by Claude Monet

In 1893 Monet had bought a strip of marshland across the road from his house and flower garden, through which flowed a tributary of the River Epte. By diverting this stream, he began to construct a waterlily garden. Soon weeping willows, iris, and bamboo grew around a free-form pool, clusters of lily pads and blossoms floated on the quiet water, and a Japanese bridge closed the composition at one end. By 1900 this unique product of Monet’s imagination (for his Impressionism had become more subjective) was in itself a major work of environmental art—an exotic lotusland within which he was to meditate and paint for almost 30 years. The first canvases he created depicting lilies, water, and the Japanese bridge were only about one square yard, but their unprecedented opeads and blossoms floating on the quiet water, and the Japanese bridge closing the composition at one end, have an almost hypnotic effect. This picture and the others depicting his garden go on to inspire the imagination of artists and gardeners as well as those of us who just enjoy the fruit of their labours

The picture is in Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

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