Still Life with Eggs

By 1907 Monet was spending nearly all his working time at the water garden he had made at Giverny, painting the lily pond again and again for a series that would finally be shown in Paris in 1909. The catalogue of his work lists those pond canvases in long runs, and in the middle of them sits this kitchen table. On a white cloth he set a glass carafe, a bowl, a crumpled towel and a wicker basket of eggs, with a few more eggs lying loose beside it. Still lifes had been occasional work for him, most of them from the 1860s to the early 1880s. He painted the same arrangement a second time, on a canvas of the same size in different tones. This one, signed at lower left, is in a private collection in the United States.