Nympheas

By the later 1890s Monet had spent years turning a patch of his garden at Giverny into a pond, diverting a small river, planting water lilies, building the little Japanese bridge. Around 1897 he started painting the surface of that water, and this is one of the first of them. There is no horizon and almost no bank, just the lily pads floating on reflected sky. He was in his late fifties, and he had found the subject that would occupy him for nearly 30 more years and something like 250 canvases, right up to the vast late murals now in Paris. Here the idea is still small and close, a quiet stretch of pond.