Nymphéas

By 1908 Monet had turned one corner of his Giverny garden, a pond he had dug and planted himself, into almost his only subject. That summer he worked on these water-lily canvases for a show he kept postponing, and in a black mood he slashed and destroyed a number of them before letting the rest go. What stayed is a view with no bank and no sky, only the surface of the water with lilies and the reflections of clouds and willows dropped into it. He was in his late sixties, and this was the autumn he first traveled to Venice, and his eyes were beginning to trouble him. The canvases that survived his doubts became the exhibition he finally held in 1909 and called series of water landscapes.