Nymphéas en fleur

Monet painted this while the First World War was tearing up the country a short drive north of his garden. From Giverny he could sometimes hear the guns of the front. He was in his 70s, his eyesight clouding with cataracts, and in 1914 he had thrown himself into an enormous late project, a wraparound series of water-lily paintings he called his Grande Decoration, big enough that he built a new studio to hold the canvases. This is one of the pond pictures from those years. His son was away at the front, and his old friend Georges Clemenceau, the politician, kept pressing him to go on painting. There is no horizon and no far bank here, only the surface of the water with the lilies on it and the sky arriving upside down as reflection. He had dug that pond himself decades earlier, diverting a stream to feed it.