Monet's Water Lilies at MoMA: The Room, the Fire and the Pond

Monet's Water Lilies hang in Gallery 515, at the west end of Floor 5 of the Museum of Modern Art. That is where MoMA listed them on 10 October 2026. The museum moves works from time to time, so check before you go.

A room with no horizon

Stand in the middle of the room and let the walls do the work. There is no horizon in these paintings, no shoreline and no sky overhead. You are looking down into a pond, where clouds float as reflections and lilies drift on the surface.

Claude Monet painted the water garden at his home in Giverny, northwest of Paris, through the last years of his life. In 1915 he built a large studio there just for these canvases, and between 1914 and his death in 1926 he made more than forty big panels, meant to wrap around whoever stood in front of them.

The triptych

The longest painting in the room is one picture in three parts, almost thirteen metres long and two metres high. Walk along it slowly. In the middle, lilies float on green and blue water, and pale violet clouds drift through it as reflections. Toward the left the brushwork turns darker and heavier. Toward the right, reddish green plants slowly take over the water. Get close and the paint becomes thick ridges and loose swipes of colour. Step back and it is a pond again.

When Monet died, twenty-two of his big panels went to the French state as his gift, and they hang on curved walls in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Panels like this one stayed in his studio into the late 1940s.

The single panel and the agapanthus

A second canvas, about six metres wide, is quieter: pale, almost silver, with pink lilies dotted across it. Its paint is thick in some places and thin in others, because Monet came back to these canvases again and again over several years. A third, taller than it is wide, shows agapanthus, a thin, wispy lily from Africa that he planted along the banks of the pond.

How they came to New York

In 1955 MoMA became the first museum in the United States to buy one of the large panels. In April 1958 a fire in the museum destroyed a big Water Lilies, and the two long canvases in this room arrived the following year.

How this fits the Roamer guide

Water Lilies is a stop on "MoMA in an Hour" and "The Unmissables in 90 Minutes" in Roamer's independent audio guide to MoMA, with its own story for the room and for each long canvas. Open Gallery 515 or start a route: the MoMA guide. For the rest of the museum, floor by floor, read what to see at MoMA.

Cover photo: Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1914 to 1926), photographed at MoMA by Stephen Sandoval for Wikipedia Loves Art; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.