Nymphéas

1908 was the year Monet took a knife to his own work. He had promised Durand-Ruel's gallery a show of the water paintings for 1907, then pushed it back, and that spring he destroyed a large batch of the canvases meant for it, by his own account around 15 of them. He was 67. The pond at Giverny had been enlarged and replanted a few years before, and he was now painting it with no bank, no horizon and no sky except the piece of sky lying on the water. This canvas, close to square at roughly 92 by 89 centimetres, is one of the survivors of that year. In the autumn he and his wife Alice went to Venice for ten weeks, and he came home able to call the series finished. 48 of these water pictures went up at Durand-Ruel in May 1909.