Water Lilies with Cloud (C.263) brought a sky element into Roy Lichtenstein's Water Lilies Series — the reflection of clouds on the water's surface, a structural device central to Monet's Giverny paintings in which the boundary between sky and pond was dissolved by the act of reflection.

The image presented lilies and floating vegetation at the lower half, diagonal bands of reflected sky above, the swirled stainless steel ground giving the reflective water surface a physical quality that corresponded to what it showed. The reflection of sky in water was among the most philosophically suggestive of Monet's structural decisions. The lily pond works were not simply depictions of a garden but investigations of what happens when a surface shows the depth of the water beneath it and the reflected sky above — when up and down, near and far, sky and earth were folded into one.

By 1992, Lichtenstein had been in sustained preoccupation with Impressionism for more than two decades, and the Water Lilies Series represented the most technically ambitious phase of that long engagement. Water Lilies with Cloud (C.263) was the work in the series that most obviously addressed the structural complexity that made Monet's late water lily paintings so significant — the folding of reflected sky into the painted surface — and it addressed it through a technical approach entirely of its own moment, the industrial steel support as far from Monet's canvas as the Ben-Day dot had been from his brushstroke.

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