Portland’s Iconic Waterlilies Returns Refreshed and Revitalized
March 1, 2025 – August 17, 2025
After more than 65 years, Claude Monet’s celebrated masterpiece Waterlilies emerges in a new light at the Portland Art Museum. Thanks to a meticulous conservation process, the painting has been carefully returned to its original brilliance—without varnish—to reveal Monet’s intended color harmonies and luminosity. This newly revived Waterlilies painting will be the star of the exhibition Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny, a tribute to the artist’s groundbreaking work and the influences that shaped it. The exhibition opens March 1, 2025, and will be on view through August 17, 2025.
Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny offers visitors new insights into Monet’s artistic lens, revealing his inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints—ukiyo-e, often referred to as “pictures of the floating world”—that captivated Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. Featuring 45 artworks including prints, photographs, and paintings, the exhibition begins by stepping into Monet’s world with a recreation of his collection of Japanese woodblock print masterpieces by artists such as Toyokuni (Utagawa Kunisada), Utagawa Hiroshige, and Kitagawa Utamaro from the Museum’s expansive print collection. It continues with Impressionist European and American responses to Japanese aesthetics, featuring works by Mary Cassatt, Bertha Lum, Henri Rivière, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who also drew inspiration from Japanese art, also from the Museum’s own collection. The exhibition concludes with the newly conserved Waterlilies, which will be displayed alongside documentation of the research and restoration process that returned the work to its intended state.
Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny also includes contemporary photographs of Giverny and Portland’s Japanese Gardens by celebrated photographers Susan Seubert and Stu Levy, offering fresh perspectives on the gardens that profoundly inspired Monet’s art.
“In the late 19th century, Japanese art introduced radical perspectives and vibrant new aesthetics to European audiences, reshaping traditions in beauty and perspective that Monet and his contemporaries eagerly embraced,” said exhibition curator Mary Weaver Chapin, Curator of Prints and Drawings. “Japanese prints had a transformative impact. The vogue for all things Japanese that swept through France was dubbed japonisme, and could be found in art, fashion, and home decoration. Graphic artists immediately adopted the radical perspectives and insistent flatness in their own work, echoing—but not mimicking—the Japanese aesthetic. Some adopted Eastern methods of printing as well, seeking to create the beautiful color effects so distinctive of ukiyo-e woodcuts. American artists were equally entranced by Japanese prints and created their own version of japonisme in the United States.”
Monet defies conventional composition in Waterlilies. With no horizon line and no clear depth, the painting immerses viewers in a tranquil but detailed world of floating lily pads, blossoming flowers, reflections of willow branches, and a raindrop-mottled surface. While invoking a moment in a natural scene, this “nature” is an artfully cultivated setting: Monet’s Japanese-inspired garden pond in Giverny, planted with imported waterlilies and maintained by a team of gardeners.
Monet’s garden-inspired series became an astonishing project of over 250 paintings, immortalizing his dreamlike water garden on canvas over nearly 30 years. The magnificent depiction of Waterlilies in the Portland Art Museum’s collection, which the artist painted in 1914-15, is widely regarded as one of the finest in the series. The Monet family kept it in their private collection, and Monet’s son Michel displayed it in the family home for decades after the artist’s death before the Portland Art Museum acquired the painting in 1959.
This past summer, with the support of Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Museum began a restoration of its Monet masterpiece to remove a layer of synthetic varnish and return Waterlilies to its original appearance as closely as possible. PAM conservator Charlotte Ameringer has conducted the delicate restoration in the Museum’s new conservation studio—part of an ambitious museum transformation that will be complete in late 2025—and the community has been invited to follow along and learn more about the conservation process in a series of videos on PAM’s website, in a “pop up” gallery, and on social media channels.
"We are thrilled to invite our community to see their renowned Waterlilies as it hasn't been seen in over 60 years—to see it as Monet intended, and to more deeply explore the art that inspired him," said Lloyd DeWitt, The Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930. “Just as our careful restoration peels back the surface layer to reveal Monet’s authentic painting, seeing his masterpiece in conversation with these works from our collection for the first time will allow visitors to appreciate the reflective depth of Monet’s artistry.”
Organized by the Portland Art Museum and co-curated by Mary Weaver Chapin, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Lloyd DeWitt, The Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930.
