The Water Lilies Series, made by Roy Lichtenstein in 1992, was among the most technically extraordinary bodies of work in his print catalogue — six works printed in screenprinted enamel on processed and swirled stainless steel, each mounted in a painted frame of aluminium or wood. Water Lilies: Pink Flower (C.261) took up the subject that Monet had made the centrepiece of his late career — the water garden at Giverny, the lily pads and their reflections, the dissolution of observed reality into pure colour and light — and translated it through a material that could not be further from oil on canvas. The stainless steel support was the series' defining material decision. Its surface, processed and swirled before printing, carrying an optical activity — a shimmering, moiré-like quality — that shifted with the viewing angle, the metal surface doing for Lichtenstein what atmospheric light had done for Monet. The screenprinted enamel, applied over this active ground, yielded an image in which the lily pads and flowers of Water Lilies: Pink Flower (C.261) floated in a field of shifting reflective effects that was materially, not atmospherically, achieved.

By 1992 Lichtenstein was in his late career, and the Water Lilies Series represented the fullest and most technically ambitious expression of his decades-long conversation with Impressionism.

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