From afar, Lego’s new set inspired by Claude Monet’s painting Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies looks like a slightly more vivid version of the original. Step a bit closer, though, and you’ll find that its intricate brushstrokes are composed of Lego bananas, katana swords, and carrot tops.
The new 3,179-piece set was created in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Monet’s original 1899 artwork, inspired by his idyllic garden in Giverny, is on display. Lego’s designers spent more than a year working in tandem with the museum’s curators to faithfully re-create the original painting’s iconic Impressionist scene. The set will be available to the public starting on March 4 for $249.99.
Over the past few years, as Lego has begun to invest heavily in its sets and products targeted at an adult audience, its designers have had to develop new construction techniques to re-create a wide range of historical artworks. These include sets based on Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night and Sunflowers, which use chunky Lego bricks to represent thick layers of paint; a set based on Art Hokusai’s The Great Wave, which achieves a 3D effect though cleverly layered bricks; and a re-creation of Keith Haring’s dancing figures, which relies on clear Lego pieces to imitate Haring’s line work. The new Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies may be their most technically challenging effort yet.
How Lego’s designers cleverly mimicked Monet’s style
From the beginning, Lego’s collaboration with The Met was a hands-on process.
“This piece was chosen through close dialogue between The LEGO Group and The Met,” says Stijn Oom, a Lego designer. “Together, we identified a fan‑favorite artwork that would translate well into an immersive build. Throughout the process, we worked with curators, reviewed color references, and explored how to mirror the painting’s layered techniques with LEGO elements. The aim was to let the build itself echo the feeling of creating the original artwork, while giving fans new entry points into Monet’s world.”
The process started with Lego’s design team visiting The Met to see Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies in person. There, they got an up-close look at Monet’s image of the Japanese-style bridge arching over his backyard pond, rendered in soft hues and small, densely packed brushstrokes. As Oom’s team began work on the Lego version, Met staffers also made trips to Lego’s headquarters in Denmark to review their drafts.
In an interview with Artnet, Alison Hokanson, a European paintings curator at The Met, explained that the painting represented a major undertaking for Lego’s team because of its intricate Impressionist technique, which is difficult to replicate with small Lego pieces.
Oom describes the process as “both thrilling and challenging.” Because Lego’s color palette was “more limited than what Monet could mix on his canvas,” Oom’s team opted for a brighter palette and blended tones to strike the right color balance. Another key obstacle was accurately recreating the painting’s sense of scale and depth. To create the optical illusion of forced perspective, Lego’s designers carefully layered smaller, darker elements behind the bridge, while positioning larger, brighter elements in front.
While experimenting with ways to mimic Monet’s depictions of light and movement, Oom’s team stumbled across several clever uses for some unexpected Lego bricks. The work’s waterlily pads, for example, are made from a combination of tiles, painter’s palettes, brushes, and shields, all layered and overlapped to echo the varied thickness and direction of the real paint strokes. The willow tree in the work’s top left corner uses bars and carrot tops to mimic long, cascading green strokes. And in the vegetation under the bridge, horns, bananas, and katana swords are all carefully placed to guide the eye across the scene.
“There are plenty of delightful ‘wait, is that . . .?’ moments built into the model, as we used a diverse array of LEGO elements including many pieces chosen to reflect Monet’s love of the natural world,” Oom says, adding, “Those unexpected parts are what make the build so enjoyable. You’re not just recreating a masterpiece—you’re discovering it piece by piece.”