Water Lily Pond with Reflections (C.264) is the most compositionally complex work in Roy Lichtenstein's Water Lilies Series — a dense arrangement of lily pads, water plants, vertical reflections, and horizontal bands of colour that filled the stainless steel support with a chromatic richness approaching the layered complexity of Monet's largest Giverny canvases. The reflections in the title were set down as vertical stripes and diagonal strokes across the image, the swirled steel ground making the pictured reflections indistinguishable, at certain angles, from the actual reflective properties of the metal surface.

Lichtenstein had spent decades probing the interaction between image and physical reality — the gap between the printed surface and the physical surface of the print. Water Lily Pond with Reflections (C.264) brought those two registers into their closest alignment: a work about reflection, printed on a reflective material. The Monet exchange was at its most intensive here. Monet's reflections in the Giverny paintings had been among the most celebrated passages of his late work — the vertical trees mirrored in the still water, the dissolution of boundary between observation and reflection that gave the paintings their hypnotic quality.

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