Claude Monet : the most famous works

The series of Water Lilies (Les Nymphéas) brings together around 250 oil paintings, all inspired by the painter's water garden at Giverny. These compositions occupied Monet for almost three decades and gradually freed themselves from any banks or bridges to focus solely on the surface of water, the reflections and the light play. The largest panels of the series are now permanently displayed in the two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where Monet himself wished them to be installed. 

Painted between the harvests of 1890 and the summer of 1891, the Haystacks (Les Meules) form a series of nearly thirty canvases. Monet went out at every hour and in every season to capture the same haystacks set in a field near his home, transformed by the shifting light. Fifteen of these works were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891, with immediate success.

Some thirty canvases form the Rouen Cathedral series, painted during the 1890s. Monet depicted the same façade at different hours of the day, from various viewpoints, with the constant aim of expressing the impalpable variations of natural light on the Gothic stone. 

Beyond the great series, Monet's body of work is rich in iconic canvases : Impression, Sunrise, the Houses of Parliament in London, the Poplars on the banks of the Epte, the views of Étretat, of Venice or of Norway. So many landscapes through which the painter pushed back the borders of perception.

• Water Lilies : approximately 250 paintings
• Haystacks : around 30 paintings (1890-1891)
• Rouen Cathedrals : 30 paintings in the 1890s
• Iconic Water Lilies on view at the Musée de l'Orangerie
• More than 2000 works produced over Monet's lifetime