Qu'est-ce que c'est ? Les grands Nymphéas verticaux de Monet de 1907, du musée Kawamura au Japon : l'une des quelque 15 sœurs verticales

What's this? It is Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas), dated 1907, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm: a tall, portrait-format look straight down onto the lily pond Monet built in his own garden at Giverny. The Wikimedia Commons file and its Wikidata entry (Q74592960) place it in the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, the art collection of the Japanese ink and resin maker DIC Corporation.

How to read it. There is no horizon, no bank and no sky, except as reflection. The museum's own Japanese note, preserved on the Commons file page from Google Arts & Culture, reads the picture like this: on the left and right, poplars and a weeping willow on the far bank throw dark-green shadows onto the water; between them opens a band of bright green where the sky is mirrored; lily flowers float across all of it. The flat surface of the water, the flowers resting on it and the depth of the reflected scene coexist in one plane, "a strange world where the real and the reflected cross" (my translation).

Why vertical? The same note says that in 1907 Monet painted about 15 canvases in this tall format, with nearly the same composition and similar sizes but different colour keys, which shows him painting one view under changing sunlight at different times of day. Tall 1907 siblings listed on Wikidata include canvases at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo (100 × 73 cm), the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (100 × 73 cm) and the Gothenburg Museum of Art (106 × 73.5 cm). The note also gives the scale of the whole project: from around 1899 until his death in 1926, Monet painted this pond in more than 200 works.

Where is it now? The Kawamura museum's official site announces that it ended operations in Sakura, Chiba, on 31 March 2025, and that DIC and the International House of Japan have agreed to work together in art and architecture. If you want to see this painting, check the museum's site for its next showing rather than travelling to Sakura.

中文一句：这是莫奈 1907 年的竖幅《睡莲》（布面油画，92.5×73.5 厘米），著录为日本 DIC 川村纪念美术馆藏。据该馆日文说明，那一年莫奈画了约 15 幅构图几乎相同的竖幅睡莲，同一片水面、不同时刻的光。该馆已于 2025 年 3 月 31 日结束在千叶佐仓的运营。