Nymphéas

By 1905 Monet was in his sixties and rarely left Giverny. A few years earlier he had enlarged the water garden below his house, diverting a branch of the Epte to feed the pond and letting the lilies spread across it. Around 1903 he began a run of canvases that did something new for him: they drop the sky and the far bank entirely and look straight down at the water. What you see is the pond's surface, the floating flowers, and the clouds reflected in it from above. He worked on many of these at once, outdoors, chasing the light as it shifted. In 1909 he gathered 48 of them for a Paris show he called simply paysages d'eau, water landscapes. This one belongs to that patient decade at the pond's edge.