Claude Monet’s Water Lilies: How to Look at a Reflection

Look at a lily pad long enough and you can see two places at once. The leaf sits flat on the water. Beside it, a tree seems to reach down into the pond. The leaf and the reflected branch touch in the picture even though the objects themselves are probably several yards apart. Claude Monet built whole paintings around that small surprise.

Cover image: an original AI-generated pond illustration created for the Rock Paper Scissors Journal to show the difference between a floating leaf and a reflection.

Begin with the bridge

In The Japanese Footbridge (1899), the easiest line to follow is the turquoise rail. Trace it from left to right. Its arch gives the pond a shape, and the vertical posts give your eye a way to measure distance. Now look directly underneath. There is another band of green, loosely broken up by pink and cream flowers. The reflected bridge shares the color of the real one, but none of its tidy edges.

Monet painted twelve views from this vantage point in 1899, according to the National Gallery of Art. That’s a good reason to slow down over this one. The route across the bridge stayed put. What he could see in the water changed with the light.

Then let the horizon go

In later pond paintings, Monet often gave the water nearly the whole canvas. The Musée de l’Orangerie describes how removing the horizon let plants and sky occupy the same surface. You can try this way of looking with our Water Lilies print. Start with the pink blooms low in the picture, then follow the dark, hanging strokes toward the pale patch in the middle. The flowers tell you where the water is. The pale patch opens up a sky inside it.

For another view from that year, look at the 1916 canvas in Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art. It is nearly square and about two meters across. At that scale, a shift in the water’s color can occupy a whole sweep of your arm.

Two ways to live with the pond

If you like a picture you can enter at a glance, try The Japanese Footbridge print. Its strong arch still reads from across a room. If you like a picture that takes a moment to resolve, try the lilies alone. Near a reading chair, you can move close enough to see where a flower gives way to a few strokes of pink.

Read Claude Monet’s artist profile or explore the Monet print collection.