Nymphéas

Monet had promised his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel a show of the water lily paintings for 1907, then for 1908, and put it off both times. Through 1908 he wrote that the pictures would not come right, that he had destroyed a number of them, and that his eyes were giving him trouble. In October he shut the studio and went to Venice with his wife Alice for more than two months, the longest he had been away from Giverny in years. The show finally opened in May 1909, 48 canvases under the title Les Nympheas, serie de paysages d'eau. This is one of the pictures that survived those two years, catalogued as Wildenstein 1721. It is almost exactly square, about 91 by 93 centimetres, a shape he came back to repeatedly in this series, and it is in private hands.