Nympheas

1908 was the year Monet nearly gave up on the water lilies. A Paris show of them had been announced for 1907, then put off to 1908, then put off again. He destroyed canvases he judged failures, complained of dizziness and doubt, and only in May 1909 did the exhibition open at Durand-Ruel with 48 paintings under the title Water Lilies: Series of Water Landscapes. This is one of the pond pictures from that stretch, and one of the few he painted round instead of rectangular. Only a handful of those exist; two of the others are in Saint-Étienne and in Houston. He gave this one to the museum in Vernon, the market town next to Giverny, in 1925, the year before he died.