Water Lily Pond, Japanese Bridge (1900)

How to look at it

Start on the bridge and follow its arch from left to right. Then let your eye fall to the water: pads and pink blossoms float in bands that shrink as they recede, which is how you feel the depth of the pond. Look for the willow and the reeds reflected in the gaps between the pads. There is no sky in the picture at all.

Why this one

A garden built to be painted. In 1893, three years after buying his property at Giverny, Monet began turning the marshy ground there into a pond. He added exotic and local plantings, including the water lilies, and built a Japanese-style wooden footbridge at its narrow end. Then he painted what he had made.

A series, not a single view. In 1899 and 1900 he made 18 similar versions of this motif. What links them, says the Art Institute, is the way the lilies mingle with reflections of the plants around the pool. Monet signed and dated this one, upper left, 1900.

The road to the Water Lilies. The bridge paintings are where the pond first fills the frame. Later the bridge left the frame and the water itself became the subject, in the Water Lilies paintings and, in the end, the murals at the Orangerie in Paris.

This canvas

Oil on canvas, 89.8 × 101 cm (35⅜ × 39¾ in), 1900, Giverny. The canvas hangs in Chicago.

Fact gap. "The Japanese Bridge" is not one painting. This 1900 canvas, catalogued in Chicago as Water Lily Pond, is one of 18 versions Monet painted in 1899–1900, and it is not the Met's taller 1899 picture. See what the record says.

Sizes vs the original

• 8×9 a desk or shelf piece, the bridge in your hand
• 16×18 about half the real canvas, the pond reads from across a room
• 24×27 about two thirds of its true size (35⅜×39¾), for a wall that wants water

Paper & ship

Archival matte fine art paper, no bleed, true 8:9 proportion, the same shape as the canvas. Printed from the public domain photograph of the painting without remastering the color. Made to order, rolled in a tube. A natural oak or soft black hairline frame both suit it.

Quick answers

Where is the Japanese bridge? In Monet's water garden at Giverny, France, which he made himself starting in 1893.

Is this the same as Monet's Water Lilies? It is the same pond. This 1900 painting shows the bridge; the later Water Lilies series looks straight down at the water.

Is this an original painting? No. It is an archival reproduction of the 1900 canvas.

Is the image public domain? Yes. Monet died in 1926, and the photograph we print from was released by its holding museum as public domain (CC0). No museum endorses this shop.