The Japanese Footbridge

Monet first painted this footbridge over his lily pond at Giverny in the 1890s, in cool greens and soft pinks, with every plank clearly drawn. This is the same bridge about 25 years later, and it is almost unrecognisable. By around 1920 Monet was in his late seventies and going blind from cataracts, which pull the world toward muddy reds and yellows and blur its edges. The bridge here has dissolved into thick, burning strokes of red and orange, the pond and the arch barely holding their shape. He kept working anyway, right up to his death in 1926, on these enormous late canvases. After an operation on one eye he was dismayed to find how far the colours he had been laying down had drifted from life.