Nymphéas avec reflets de hautes herbes

Monet painted this at Giverny sometime between 1914 and 1917, when his days were organised around a project on a scale he had never tried before, a set of water-lily decorations meant to run right round the walls of a room. Canvases like this one, two metres wide, were studies for it, and he painted them outdoors at the edge of the pond in spring and summer, with ropes and stakes holding them steady. There is no horizon here and no bank. The only thing to steady your eye is the long grass at the top, hanging in from outside the frame, and beneath it the dark, blurred strokes that are its reflection in the water. Monet never signed it. The name in the lower right corner is a stamp added after his death in 1926, when the canvases left in his studio passed to his son Michel.