Water Lilies (French: Nymphéas [nɛ̃.fe.a]) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last 31 years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.

Background

Monet's long-standing preference for producing and exhibiting a series of paintings related by subject and perspective began in 1889, with at least ten paintings done at the Valley of the Creuse, which were shown at the Galerie Georges Petit. Among his other famous series are his Haystacks.

During the 1920s, the state of France built a pair of oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie as a permanent home for eight large water lily murals by Monet. The exhibit opened to the public on 16 May 1927, a few months after Monet's death. Sixty water lily paintings from around the globe were assembled for a special exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in 1999.

The paintings are on prominent display at museums all over the world, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, The Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Legion of Honor. In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston celebrated its 150th anniversary with some of Monet's Water Lilies paintings.

Oscar-Claude Monet (UK: , US: ; French: [klod mɔnɛ]; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of Impressionism painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, which was exhibited in 1874 at the First Impressionist Exhibition, initiated by Monet and a number of like-minded artists as an alternative to the Salon.

Monet was raised in Le Havre, Normandy, and became interested in the outdoors and drawing from an early age. Although his mother, Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, supported his ambitions to be a painter, his father, Claude-Adolphe, disapproved and wanted him to pursue a career in business. He was very close to his mother, but she died in January 1857 when he was sixteen years old, and he was sent to live with his childless, widowed but wealthy aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. He went on to study at the Académie Suisse, and under the academic history painter Charles Gleyre, where he was a classmate of Auguste Renoir. His early works include landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, but attracted little attention. A key early influence was Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to the concept of plein air painting. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, also in northern France, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond.