Water Lilies: one pond, painted for twenty-seven years

There is no single Water Lilies. The series runs from 1899, when Monet first set up at the edge of his pond, to 1926, the year he died; the count is usually given as about 250 paintings, from small studies to panels more than two metres high. The best-known group is the eight at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, installed in 1927, a year after his death, in two oval rooms designed around them.

Almost all of them show the same thing: the surface of the pond at Giverny, with sky and willows reflected in it, and no bank, no horizon, no shore. That subtraction is the achievement. He spent the last third of his life taking everything out of the picture except water, and then painting the water until it stopped reading as water and started reading as paint.

The garden he built in order to paint it

Monet bought the house at Giverny in 1890 and made the water garden from 1893, diverting water from the Ru, a small branch of the Epte, to fill a pond. He planted water lilies, brought in exotic plants and built the Japanese bridge. Local farmers objected to the plants and to the diversion of the stream; he needed permission and got it. The garden was a construction, made for looking at, and it became the subject of the rest of his work.

He did not paint it as landscape. From 1899 he worked at the edge of the pond with several canvases going at once, moving between them as the light changed — the method he had used for the haystacks and the Rouen cathedral. The difference is that this motif was at his own door and repeatable every day for years, so he could wait for exact conditions instead of travelling to find them.

The horizon disappears

In the early water lily paintings there is still a bank at the top of the canvas, or a curve of the pond's edge, so the viewer knows where they are standing and which way the bank runs. By the late ones there is nothing: the whole surface is water, and the reflections of sky and willow are the only evidence of anything above. The picture becomes a vertical plane showing a horizontal surface — a contradiction the eye accepts because the paint is consistent across it.

That is why the late paintings get called precursors of abstraction. They are not abstract: there is still a pond, still lilies, still the reflection of a particular tree. But the subject has shifted from the thing to the surface, and the brushwork stops describing and starts recording the act of looking, which is a different job and the one that twentieth-century painting took up.

Colour, and the cataract years

The palette moves across the series. Early canvases are greens, blues and pinks, with water clear enough to see into; the late ones are darker and warmer, with more red and yellow, and the forms looser. Monet was diagnosed with cataracts in 1912 and operated in 1923. His colour sense was affected, and the late work is often read in that light. It is a reasonable reading, not a diagnosis of the paintings.

The Orangerie panels are the extreme case. Two metres high, several metres long, hung in curves and lit from above, they are the only Water Lilies where scale is part of the subject: you stand inside the painting instead of in front of it. Monet worked on them for years, destroyed some, and the installation was completed after his death, following the plan he had agreed with the state.

In the Orangerie, and on a domestic wall

The rooms were renovated in 2006 to bring back daylight, since Monet had designed them for natural light from above. The panels carry no frames; the paint simply stops where the wall curves. Seen there, the missing horizon does something physical: the eye has nowhere to rest and keeps travelling across the surface, which is the closest thing in a museum to sitting at the edge of water for twenty minutes.

A painting on a domestic wall cannot do that. At 100 or 120 cm you get the colour, the drawing of the lily pads and the structure of the reflections, and you lose the immersion, because immersion depends on the picture being wider than your field of view. What a hand copy can do honestly is the surface: the thin layers, the scumbled sky in the water, a stroke of pink sitting under a stroke of green. What it cannot do is two rooms of wall.