Twelve paintings made between 1333 and 1971 show what painters did with the lily, from an altar in Siena Cathedral to a bedroom in London.
In church pictures, the white flower belongs to the Virgin Mary. Later painters borrowed it to speak of a pregnancy, a song or a marriage. In one Annunciation by Jan van Eyck, the vase of lilies was added late, once the room around it was painted.
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How These Were Chosen
When painters put a lily in a picture, they nearly always mean one flower, the white Madonna lily. Christian art gave it to the Virgin as the emblem of her purity, and it became the regular companion of the Annunciation, the moment when the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will bear a child.
The flower suited a church. One straight white stem reads clearly from across the nave, the long central hall where the faithful stand, and states a doctrine without a written word. Because the same blossom stood at funerals, it could point to a death as easily as to a birth.
Each painting here was chosen because its lily carries a meaning the picture needs. The countdown opens with five modern works, from 1849 to 1971, where painters bend the old church code.
It then goes back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when that code was at its height, and ends with the altarpiece whose lilies say the most. The first picture, Monet's, shows a plant that is a lily only in name.
12. Claude Monet, Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899)
Under the green footbridge in this canvas, flat leaves and pale blossoms float on the water. They are water lilies, and despite the name they are not true lilies. A true lily grows from a bulb underground and carries its flowers at the tip of a tall stem.
Water lilies live in the water itself, and their leaves float flat on the surface. Botanists place them in a family of their own, far from the Madonna lily.
Claude Monet painted the scene in 1899, in the water garden he had made at Giverny, the village northwest of Paris where he lived. The pond did not exist when he settled there. In 1893 he bought a marshy plot across the railway line from his house and asked for permission to dig it out and fill it from a nearby brook.
The request ran into trouble because of the very plants he meant to grow. Several people in Giverny claimed that his water lilies would poison the stream, and the municipality turned him down.
Monet went over the municipality's head to the Prefect of the Eure, the state official in charge of the département. In a letter of July 1893, he explained that he wanted to "cultivate aquatic plants ... for the pleasure of the eyes and in order to have subjects to paint." The Prefect approved.
Six years later, those subjects filled this canvas. The arched footbridge, which Monet had built in the Japanese style he knew from the prints he collected, still takes half the space.
He kept painting the pond until his death in 1926, in about 250 canvases of water lilies. In many of the later ones the bank vanishes from the frame, leaving only the water, the floating flowers and the sky reflected in it.
At a Glance
Artist: Claude Monet
Painted: 1899, Giverny
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 92.7 × 73.7 cm (36.5 × 29 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
11. David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970 to 1971)
A vase of lilies stands on a plain table beside the textile designer Celia Birtwell, who wears a purple dress and keeps one hand on her hip. Across the room, her husband, the fashion designer Ossie Clark, lounges barefoot on a metal chair with a white cat on his lap.
David Hockney painted his two friends near life size, and he did not seat them together. The flowers went to her side of the room, the cat to his, and each was chosen for what it said about the person beside it.