Der Garten des Künstlers in Giverny

By 1900, when Monet painted this, Giverny was not just where he lived, it was the thing he had been building for years. He had bought the property in Normandy, diverted a stream, hired gardeners, and turned the grounds into a living motif he could paint without leaving home. Here he sets rows of irises running on a strong diagonal across the canvas, purples and pinks under trees that break the sunlight into patches, with a glimpse of his own pink house beyond. Irises were among his favourites, and he grew something like 17 different varieties, so this is less an invented scene than a portrait of a garden he had composed himself. He was around 60 and his eyesight was beginning to trouble him, the cataracts that would later change his colours. The water-lily paintings that dominate his final decades were just ahead. This canvas is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, one of many he made of the same few metres of ground over the last 30 years of his life.