The Japanese bridge

By 1921 the argument in Monet's life was about the big pictures. His old friend Georges Clemenceau, France's prime minister through the last years of the war, had got him to promise a set of huge water lily panels to the state, and that year the two were still arguing over where the panels would hang and whether they were finished. Monet, then 80, threatened at one point to withdraw the gift and signed it over only in 1922. In the same years he kept walking out to the pond with smaller canvases to paint the wooden footbridge he had built there in the 1890s, by then swallowed by a trellis of wisteria. He made about two dozen of these late bridge pictures, worked in hot reds and oranges, and many of them never left the studio in his lifetime.