Self-Portrait

Monet almost never painted himself, and he was 76 when he made this, in the middle of the First World War. He stayed at Giverny through it, where he could sometimes hear the guns of the front, working on the enormous water-lily panels that filled his last years. This is a rare look at the man himself: white beard, a soft hat, the face loosened into the same broken strokes he used on his ponds. He gave the picture to his old friend Georges Clemenceau, the tough politician who became France's wartime prime minister that November. It was Clemenceau who pressed him to hand the great water-lily paintings to the nation, and Clemenceau who left this portrait to France at his own death.