Claude Monet Water Lilies Masterpiece Heads to Auction
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The marquee painting from Monet’s 'Nymphéas' series is set to test the market on 24 June and could sell for around $75 million.
In 1893, three years after buying property in Giverny, France, Claude Monet diverted a small tributary in to his flower garden to create a pond. The artist was captivated by the way light bounced off reflective surfaces and this new garden feature became a blank canvas that would eventually feature in nearly 300 paintings - and make it the world's most admired pond.
“I love water but I also love flowers,” he said, according to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the French institution that today owns the artist's Giverny home. Claude Monet's profound connection to nature is famous, with his outdoor spaces serving as his greatest inspiration. His famous quote, "My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece," perfectly encapsulates his dedication.
Monet’s choice of water lilies to plant in the bed of his pond proved influential. The flower’s growth atop water embodied “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore,” Monet said, according to the Musée de l’Orangerie.
For three decades, Monet featured his water lilies in a series of paintings, known collectively today as Nymphéas (French for water lilies), which are considered his most famous works. Indeed, the most famous of them all are probably the monumental series of The Water Lilies paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. These were a gift from Monet to France, given the day after the armistice of 11 November 1918 and were displayed according to his design in the Orangerie in 1927.
Later this month, a 1907 Nymphéas is heading to auction in London at Sotheby's. They have given it an estimated price of $40 million but that could be well south of the final hammer price. In 2024, a Nymphéas canvas painted between 1914 and 1917 sold for $65.5 million; a few months earlier, a different Nymphéas painting sold for $74 million at auction, whilst Nymphéas en fleur went under the hammer for $75 million in 2018.
OGN will keep you posted as to the figure achieved for this latest Nymphéas to hit the market.
Artist And Gardner: Visit Claude Monet's Garden at Giverny (3 minute video)
