The Water Lilies - Setting Sun

Of the eight compositions here, this is the smallest, a single panel six metres wide, and it sits at the western end of the whole ensemble. The placing was deliberate. The two oval rooms run from east to west along the Seine, and Monet arranged his scenes to follow the course of the sun, with dawn tones to the east and dusk to the west. The sun itself never appears here. The blaze of yellow and gold low in the picture is its reflection on the pond. The reeds and tall grasses in front of it are laid down in quick curved strokes of green and brown. Beside that glow the water turns dark violet, with lily pads sitting in shadow. Clemenceau, Monet's close friend and the wartime prime minister, published a book about these panels in 1928, the year after the rooms opened. In it he wrote of the flash of fire that blinds us in this last panel, the setting sun caught in the dry reeds of a winter marsh.