Waterlily (C.281) arrives at a moment when Lichtenstein had spent three decades working through the history of art on his own terms, reworking Picasso, Matisse, and Léger through the language of commercial printing, and Monet's water lilies became one of his final major subjects before his death in 1997. The Water Lilies Series marked a departure from the interiors and brushstroke paintings that had occupied him through the late 1980s, turning instead toward Impressionism itself as source material, an artist whose entire reputation rested on dissolving form into light and colour. Lichtenstein had first engaged with Monet's cathedral and haystack paintings earlier in the decade, and the water lilies extended that same project of translating one of art history's most revered and reproduced bodies of work into his own flattened, mechanically reproduced idiom.

The series arrived at a moment when Lichtenstein's printmaking practice was at its most technically ambitious, working with master printers to achieve increasingly complex colour separations and surface effects within editions that remained, by his own choice, accessible rather than exclusive. Coming so late in his career, these prints read as a kind of summation, Lichtenstein applying the visual system he'd spent thirty years developing to the single artist most associated with the opposite of everything his own work stood for.

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