Every artist has his or her share of hits and misses in the course of a career. Claude Monet (1840-1926) is said to have burned many paintings he considered unsuccessful. In my opinion there are still really great as well as so-so Monets to be seen.

One of the really great ones resides in the Dayton Art Institute. “Waterlillies” (1903, 40”x32”, oil on canvas) is a flat out home run of a painting. Here we see Monet at the very peak of his powers. It’s one of the best Impressionist paintings as it embodies so much that was good about the style. The color is radiant, exquisite but very subtle at the same time. The handling is full of beautiful marks and luscious brushwork. A series of lily pads climb a diagonal to the top register of the painting. A delicate “fringe” or tapestry of branches, hang from the upper left quadrant.

In many ways this is a very modern painting. Most of the usual landscape references, such as a horizon, sky, ground plane are barely acknowledged or ignored altogether. The sky is seen only as a reflection in the water. This is meditation on a quiet pond on a summer’s day, and it pulls one into its reverie. The flatness of the pattern and unusual perspective is a reference to the newly seen Japanese woodblock prints. The fields of subtle shifting color presage more non-objective painting by some fifty years. In fact Money was one historic artist that the American Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s revered.

The Dayton Art Institute is one of Ohio’s finest Art Museums, chock full of fabulous treasures. This painting alone is worth the trip.