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Primary sourcePainting1899 onward

Water Lilies

Claude Monet · 1899 onward

A series of about 250 paintings by Monet of his flower garden pond at Giverny, made over the last decades of his life.

Clemenceau, Monet's close friend, pushed him to finish these panels and arranged their gift to France as an Armistice memorial.

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Detail of an impressionist painting of water lilies on a pond: pale green lily pads with reddish-purple outlines float on blue-grey water, with pink water lily blossoms at right and loose green and yellow brushstrokes in the background.
Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Nymphéas), from 1899. Various collections, France and worldwide.

About this source

What it is

Water Lilies is a series of roughly 250 oil paintings made by Claude Monet, showing the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. He painted them over the final 31 years of his life, some while suffering from cataracts. The works are spread across many museums worldwide, including the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Musée de l'Orangerie, where a special set of large murals was installed after his death.

Why it matters

The series shows Monet's lifelong habit of painting one subject many times under changing light, pushed here to its furthest point, with brushwork that moves toward near-abstraction. It reveals an artist in old age, working almost obsessively on a small, personal subject right outside his door, and the paintings remain among the most recognised works of modern art.

Look closer

  • How realistic or abstract do the shapes of the lily pads and flowers look to you?
  • Why might an artist spend decades painting the same small pond over and over?
  • What might declining eyesight have changed about how Monet saw and painted color?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Georges Clemenceau on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Front cover of a printed booklet of the Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, signed at Versailles June 28th, 1919, with a royal crest at the bottom and London publisher details. Tan cover with grey spine.Document

Primary source

Treaty of Versailles

28 June 1919

Black-and-white photograph of four men in dark suits standing on a stone step before a doorway. Left: a man with white hair talking with a man in a suit with a mustache. Right of them: a mustached older man with a bow tie, and a man with white hair at the far right. A Signal Corps stamp is visible at lower left.Photograph

Primary source

The Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference

Edward N. Jackson · 27 May 1919

Painting of a formal assembly in an ornate gilded hall with tall arched windows. Men in dark suits and some in military uniform sit and stand around a long table in the foreground, with a seated figure in the lower center.Painting

Primary source

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June 1919

William Orpen · 1919

Front page of the newspaper L'Aurore, Thursday 13 January 1898, with the large headline J'Accuse...! Lettre au Président de la République, par Émile Zola. Dense columns of printed text fill the page.Newspaper article

Primary source

J'accuse…!

Émile Zola · 13 January 1898

Painting of a bald man with a dark handlebar mustache, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and dark bow tie, with arms folded against a muted grey-brown background. Loose, sketchy brushwork.Painting

Primary source

Portrait of Georges Clemenceau

Édouard Manet · 1879-1880

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