Monet's Water Lilies: inside the Orangerie's two oval rooms

An installation, not a collection of paintings

In most museum rooms, a painting has a life of its own: it was painted on a stretcher, framed, then hung somewhere that could just as easily have been somewhere else. The Water Lilies at the Orangerie do not work that way. The eight large compositions covering the walls of the museum's two oval rooms were painted for this specific space, whose shape, orientation and lighting were themselves settled with the paintings in mind. Removing one panel from its wall, or visiting one room without the other, would change the meaning of the whole.

This is also why the work does not lend itself to being identified piece by piece: there are not eight separate paintings to pick out here, but a single continuous gesture, spread across two rooms.

1. A gift for victory, sealed by a friendship

On 12 November 1918, the day after the armistice was signed, Monet wrote to Georges Clemenceau, then President of the Council and his friend for nearly thirty years, to tell him he was finishing two decorative panels he wished to give to the State: "It is a small thing, but it is the only way I have of taking part in the victory." The gesture belongs to a long-standing relationship: Clemenceau visited Giverny regularly, and the two men corresponded for close to forty years, until the painter's death.

What Monet proposes in 1918 is modest: two panels. It is Clemenceau who pushes to extend the gift to the whole cycle then under way and to give it a space worthy of it. The donation to the State, covering the full set of panels destined for the Orangerie, is formalised by deed on 12 April 1922 — more than three years after the initial letter, the time it took for the architectural project and the number of panels involved to be settled.

2. Two oval rooms designed together with the painter

To house the panels, the architect Camille Lefèvre, of the Louvre administration, oversaw the fitting-out of two oval rooms inside the Orangerie building — but following Monet's own instructions, since the painter involved himself directly in the choices that would shape how his work was perceived: the shape of the rooms, how they follow one another, the light.

The two ovals, placed end to end, trace the outline of a figure eight, or an infinity symbol, which the visitor follows continuously from one room into the other. They are oriented east-west, and the lighting comes exclusively from the ceiling, through overhead skylights that let in natural light rather than a fixed artificial source.

Each room brings together four large compositions. The first gathers Morning, Green Reflections, Clouds and Setting Sun, which follow the course of daylight over the water. The second brings together Morning with Willows, Reflections of Trees, The Two Willows and Clear Morning with Willows, dominated by the hanging branches of weeping willows.

3. A continuous wall two metres high and ninety-one metres long

The eight compositions, assembled from twenty-two canvases, each measure two metres in height; placed end to end along the walls of the two rooms, they total around ninety-one metres in length. The canvases are mounted directly onto the curved walls, without the projecting frames that would elsewhere mark the boundary between two works: from one panel to the next, the painted surface continues without visible break.

This continuity answers an intention Monet had already formulated in 1909, in an interview with the critic Roger Marx, well before the Orangerie project existed: he imagined a room papered with the motif of the water lilies that would give "the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon and without shore," offering whoever entered it "the refuge of a peaceful meditation at the centre of a flowering aquarium." No horizon line, no shore, no identifiable sky: only the surface of the water, its reflections, and whatever floats upon it.

4. A posthumous opening, then decades out of the spotlight

Monet died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, without having seen the finished rooms: the mounting of the canvases on the Orangerie's walls was not completed until the first months of 1927. The museum, then called the Musée Claude-Monet, was opened on 17 May 1927 by Clemenceau himself, a little over five months after the painter's death.

After this opening, the Orangerie did not remain for long a place devoted solely to the Water Lilies: in 1946, the building was notably used to display works looted or sold under duress during the Occupation, before going through decades in which attention to the museum stayed secondary compared with other Parisian institutions. The Walter-Guillaume collection, bequeathed to the State in 1977, only found its permanent home in the museum's basement after a refurbishment completed in 1984 — a collection covered in detail by another article on this site.

How much time

The two rooms can be visited one after the other, with no set direction. Natural light changes over the course of the day and noticeably alters the colours of the panels: a visit in late morning and one in late afternoon do not show quite the same thing.

First oval room — 15 minutes.
Second oval room — 15 minutes.
A still pause in front of one panel, to let the eye adjust to the absence of any reference point — 5 minutes.

Sources and verification

The facts cited here draw on the archives and publications of the Musée de l'Orangerie, on the Monet-Clemenceau correspondence, and on the Wikipedia entries devoted to the museum and to the Water Lilies cycle.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée de l’Orangerie website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.