# What is Claude Monet's best painting?

> A harbour at dawn, a pond painted for thirty years, a dying wife, a railway shed full of steam. One painter, and no two of these mean the same thing.

*By YPB Team · Published September 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-claude-monets-best-painting*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Water Lilies** — score 1000/1000
   The pond at Giverny, painted across roughly 250 canvases in his last three decades.
2. **Bordighera** — score 952/1000
   An 1884 Italian riviera landscape in colours he called impossible to send home.
3. **La Gare Saint-Lazare** — score 762/1000
   Steam and iron inside the Paris terminus, 1877.
4. **Woman with a Parasol** — score 659/1000
   His wife Camille and son Jean on a windy hillside at Argenteuil, 1875.
5. **Rouen Cathedral, West Facade** — score 659/1000
   One of about thirty canvases of the same facade at different hours.
6. **Impression, Sunrise** — score 571/1000
   The 1872 harbour scene at Le Havre that gave Impressionism its name.
7. **Camille on Her Deathbed** — score 571/1000
   His first wife, painted as she died in 1879.
8. **Garden at Sainte-Adresse** — score 467/1000
   An 1867 terrace by the sea, flags snapping, painted before Impressionism had a name.
9. **The Magpie** — score 467/1000
   An 1869 snow scene rejected by the Salon and now among his most loved.
10. **The Cliff Walk at Pourville** — score 467/1000
   Two figures on a Normandy clifftop, 1882.
11. **The Japanese Footbridge** — score 343/1000
   The green bridge over the lily pond at Giverny.
12. **Meules (Haystacks)** — score 343/1000
   Grain stacks in a neighbour's field, painted about twenty-five times.
13. **Houses of Parliament, London** — score 343/1000
   Westminster dissolving in Thames fog across a series painted from a hotel balcony.
14. **The Poplars** — score 0/1000
   A row of trees on the Epte that Monet bought outright to stop them being felled.
15. **The Luncheon on the Grass** — score 0/1000
   His huge, partly destroyed answer to Manet, begun in 1865.

Tags: art, france, paintings, impressionism, claude monet