This can be considered somewhat of a unique composition within Monet's series of water lily paintings. Most of his detailed pieces in which he focuses on just a small part of his pond will normally not include the edge of the border alongside the water - normally it would be just one or the other. By doing it this way, we have additional context with which to understand the composition and that was not always what Monet desired. Within Water-Lilies with Reflections of Green Grasses we can identify roughly where we are situated within the garden and also consider how he had designed the garden to transition smoothly from land to water and vice versa. The grasses themselves bring about a strong shadow which continues their outline on the surface of the water, as well as adding a feeling of perspective, with a vertical climb above the flat lily pods.
A further difference can be found in the water lilies themselves, which are left with very little detail, even though they are relatively large and placed directly in front of us. Could this painting have been left unfinished? Or perhaps the artist intended to be less precise in this painting as he moved towards a more abstract approach that could be found in more of his work by the turn of the century. Further research would be needed in order to better understand this. The lily pods are in green and purple, with the artist carefully alternating between the two in order to create a sort of tiled effect, though with very little space between each one. There is then a good area of open water to the top right of the painting, which allows the content to breathe, and the purple tones of the water to dominate. Monet would often re-use a composition style again and again, such as with his view of the japanese bridge when sat directly in front of it, but in this case Water-Lilies with Reflections of Green Grasses appears to have been entirely a one-off.
The artist stamped this artwork with his signature in the lower right and it is sized at 200cm by 130cm. He gave it an original French title of Nympheas avec Reflets de Hautes Herbes and it achieved greater focus in 2013 when coming up for sale at auction. It eventually achieved a price of £9,001,250, which was slightly below expectations, but still an impressive figure nonetheless. This inability to quite command that highly valuation might have been due to how the composition differed from most of his other more famous water lily paintings, as well as the large number of artworks that he created on this topic.
