Water Lilies: Blue Lily Pads (C.262) is the most purely abstract work in Roy Lichtenstein's Water Lilies Series — a image in which the lily pads, set in deep blue and purple tones, are held within a circular frame that gives the work an object-like presence distinct from the rectangular compositions that dominate the series. The circular framing, combined with the work's mounting in a painted and routered relief wood frame, made Water Lilies: Blue Lily Pads (C.262) the most explicitly sculptural of the series. Monet's own water lily paintings had culminated in the vast oval canvases installed in the Orangerie in Paris — works that surrounded the viewer with a continuous field of water and reflection, the boundaries of the individual painting dissolved into an immersive environment.

Lichtenstein's circular framing within a rectangular support was a compressed echo of that impulse: the circular view into the pond, bounded by the hard edge of the frame, the depth of the water suggested by the swirled steel ground, not by painterly recession. Water Lilies: Blue Lily Pads (C.262) was the work in the series in which the distance from Monet's sensory experience was most clearly stated — and in stating it so clearly, it made the terms of its Impressionist inheritance most explicit.

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