When Claude Monet Planted Water Lilies, Inspiration Struck. An Upcoming Auction Will Test How Much Collectors Prize the Floral Masterpieces

The marquee painting from Monet’s “Nymphéas” series is expected to fetch more than $40 million at auction later this month

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

June 12, 2026 4:48 p.m.

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In 1893, three years after buying property in Giverny, France, inspiration struck painter Claude Monet in his flower garden.

Fascinated by the way light bounced off reflective surfaces, Monet was drawn to a small tributary of the nearby River Epte. He diverted this waterway onto his property, creating a standing pond.

For Monet, this new garden feature was a blank canvas.

“I love water but I also love flowers,” he said, according to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the French institution that today owns Monet’s home. “That’s why, once the pond was filled, I thought about adorning it with plants. I got a catalogue and simply chose at random.”

Monet’s choice of water lilies to plant in the bed of his pond proved influential. The flower’s growth atop water embodied “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore,” Monet said, according to the Musée de l’Orangerie.

For three decades, Monet featured his water lilies in a series of nearly 300 paintings, known collectively today as Nymphéas (French for water lilies), which are considered his most famous works. One Water Lily cycle, a set of massive canvases that together comprise more than 2,000 square feet, was described by fellow painter André Masson as “the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.”

In 2026, these works continue to be coveted. Later this month, a 1907 Nymphéas heading to auction in London is expected to fetch more than $40 million—the highest estimate ever placed on a Monet painting sold at auction in Europe.

“This is from his peak period of the classic square- or almost-square-format water lilies series, that spans the period from 1904 to 1909,” Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and chairman of Impressionist and modern art worldwide, tells ARTnews’ Brian Boucher. “He goes right into the surface of the pond and focuses on the water as a reflection of the sky, stripping away the bank, so that it begins to verge on pure abstraction. And it has a gorgeous palette, with everything that you can hope for in terms of the variation of pigment.”

Joining the water lily canvas is Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville (1870), a portrait of Monet’s wife Camille sitting on a beach on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war. The piece, which is expected to sell for more than $9 million, has only ever been exhibited publicly once, in 1970 in Paris.

“The portrait of Camille reads almost as a manifesto of his pioneering plein air approach, and is remarkable for its freshness, spontaneity and immediacy of vision,” Newman says in a statement issued by Sotheby’s, the auction house selling the pieces. “Set beside the water lilies—arguably Monet’s defining and most recognisable body of work—painted almost half a century later, one can trace the extraordinary arc of his artistic evolution.”

The artworks might sell for more than anticipated. In 2024, a Nymphéas canvas painted between 1914 and 1917 sold for $65.5 million in New York after a 17-minute bidding war, ArtNet’s Katya Kazakina reported at the time. Several months earlier, a different Nymphéas piece sold for $74 million at auction in New York, while Nymphéas en fleur went under the hammer for $75 million—$85 million with fees—in 2018.

Sale of the two pieces will take place on June 24 as part of Sotheby’s larger Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction. The event will mark just the third time that the 1907 Nymphéas piece will be on public view. It was displayed in 2010 in New York and in 1909 in Paris, an occasion that prompted the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer to say that “Here, more than ever before, painting approached music and poetry,” per ARTnews.

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.