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50 free Monet's Water Lilies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Monet's Water Lilies trivia quiz covers the roughly 250 paintings of his lily pond at Giverny that occupied Claude Monet for the last three decades of his life. The easy questions handle the basics: the French title Nymphéas, the village where the pond was dug, the green bridge that Julie Manet thought looked 'rather Japanese', the Paris museum built to house the great murals, and the eye disease that changed how he saw colour. From there it moves through the making of the garden itself: the marshy plot bought in 1893, the neighbours who feared his flowers would poison the stream, the diverted Ru, the six gardeners, and the pond that grew to four times its original size. The harder half is for art lovers: the 1909 exhibition of 48 canvases, the shift from rectangular to round stretchers, the Weeping Willow series painted for the war dead, Georges Clemenceau's role in steering the murals to the Orangerie, the 1923 cataract operation and the canvases Monet destroyed afterwards, the neglect of the estate after Blanche's death, the American donors who restored it, and the string of record-breaking auctions from Le Bassin aux Nymphéas to Nymphéas en fleur. If you enjoyed our Claude Monet or Impressionism quizzes, this is the deep dive on his final, greatest subject. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Water Lilies series, Claude Monet, the Fondation Claude Monet and the Musée de l'Orangerie before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Monet was a leading figure of which art movement?
Impressionism
The movement took its name from his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise.
Q 02What is the French title of Monet's Water Lilies series?
Nymphéas
The name is the French word for the water lily genus, and the series runs to roughly 250 canvases.
Q 03Roughly how many oil paintings make up the Water Lilies series?
About 250
They were the main focus of his work for the last 31 years of his life.
Q 04Monet's house and lily pond lie in which region of France?
Normandy
With 530,000 visitors in 2010 the estate was the region's second most visited site after Mont Saint-Michel.
Q 05Which structure spanning the pond appears in many of the garden paintings?
A Japanese bridge
Built by a local craftsman in 1893, it was later draped in wisteria; termites had undermined it by the time restoration began.
Q 06Many of the Water Lilies were painted while Monet suffered from which eye condition?
Cataracts
He finally had surgery in 1923 and, once 'able to see the real colours', began destroying canvases from before the operation.
Q 07The museum built to house eight great Water Lilies murals stands in the west corner of which Paris garden?
The Tuileries
Its two oval rooms opened to the public on 16 May 1927, a few months after Monet's death.
Q 08The Orangerie's two oval rooms of Water Lilies are arranged to form which shape?
An infinity symbol
The eight panels are two metres high and lit by skylights at Monet's insistence.
Q 09How long, end to end, are the eight Water Lilies panels in the Orangerie?
91 m
Because the building runs east to west, the rooms lie on the same solar axis as the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre.
Q 10Which French statesman, a friend of Monet, insisted the Water Lilies murals go to the Orangerie rather than the Musée Rodin?
Georges Clemenceau
At Monet's funeral he tore off the black pall, declaring 'No black for Monet!', and replaced it with a flowered cloth.
Q 11What was the Orangerie building originally built for in 1852?
Storing citrus trees in winter
Its Seine-facing side is glass to let in light, while the north wall is almost windowless against the cold.
Q 12Under what name was the Orangerie first inaugurated on 17 May 1927?
The Musée Claude Monet
It was soon annexed to the Musée du Luxembourg and given its present formal name.
Q 13How many Water Lilies panel paintings were displayed at the Orangerie in May 1927, according to Monet's biography?
27
Few people came; his late work was largely ignored until it was rediscovered in the 1950s.
Q 21How high did the Seine rise at Paris in the January 1910 flood that swamped Monet's water garden?
8 m
Alice reported Monet in despair, saying everything was lost and he must sell the house and the car.
Q 22How many Water Lilies paintings hung in the long-delayed exhibition Les Nymphéas that finally opened on 6 May 1909?
48
They dated from 1903 to 1908, and Monet had postponed the show repeatedly since 1906 while reworking and destroying canvases.
Q 23Around 1905, how did Monet change the shape of his Water Lilies canvases?
From rectangular to square and then circular
At the same time he stopped showing the pond's banks, so the water surface filled the whole picture.
Q 14In which year did Monet begin painting the water lilies that would occupy him for the rest of his life?
1899
The first group he exhibited, in 1900, was devoted mainly to his Japanese bridge.
Q 15On 5 February 1893 Monet bought a marshy plot across the railway line from his house, crossed by which small brook?
The Ru
It was a diversion of the Epte, itself a tributary of the Seine, and Clemenceau joked that Monet 'has the train at home'.
Q 16Why did some Giverny villagers oppose Monet's plan to divert water into his new pond in 1893?
They feared his flowers would poison the stream
The council turned him down in April; the Prefect approved it in July after Monet explained he wanted aquatic plants 'for the pleasure of the eyes and in order to have subjects to paint'.
Q 17Visiting in October 1893, which young diarist recorded 'an ornamental lake across which is a green bridge which looks rather Japanese'?
Julie Manet
The daughter of Berthe Morisot was visiting with her mother; the little footbridge was built by a local craftsman.
Q 18At the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Monet is believed to have met which horticulturist, the breeder of hybrid coloured water lilies?
Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac
Monet planted native white lilies alongside imported cultivars from South America and Egypt to get yellows, blues and pinks.
Q 19By 1904, how many full-time gardeners was Monet employing at Giverny?
Six
He wrote daily instructions to them and stayed the garden's architect even as his wealth grew.
Q 20After diverting more water in 1902, Monet enlarged the lily pond to roughly how many times its original size?
Triple
He added a small island, and after the 1910 Seine flood he recontoured the banks into their final shape, four times the original area.
Q 24By the mid-1910s Monet's fluid new style had made the lily pond the point of departure for what?
An almost abstract art
Critic Claude Roger-Marx said the 1909 show had 'reached the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination'.
Q 25During the First World War, Monet painted a series of which tree at the edge of his pond as a homage to fallen French soldiers?
Weeping willow
His younger son Michel was serving at the front at the time.
Q 26Which two artists' botched cataract operations made Monet reluctant to have surgery himself?
Honoré Daumier and Mary Cassatt
He said he would rather have poor sight and keep painting; Clemenceau eventually talked him into the 1923 operation.
Q 27After his 1923 cataract surgery Monet struggled with cyanopsia, a distortion that tints vision which colour?
Blue
Tinted Zeiss lenses helped, though his left eye eventually had to be covered with a black lens.
Q 28In 1913 Monet travelled to London to consult which German ophthalmologist about his eyes?
Richard Liebreich
He was prescribed new glasses and turned down surgery on his right eye.
Q 29What was said of the Water Lilies at the time of Monet's death in December 1926?
They were technically unfinished
He died of lung cancer at 86 and asked for a simple funeral; only about fifty people came.
Q 30Which movement 'rediscovered' Monet's late Water Lilies in the 1950s?
The Abstract Expressionists
A 1952 essay by André Masson helped change how the paintings were seen after decades of neglect.