The Water Lilies - Tree Reflections

In May 1922, weeks after signing the deed that gave the Water Lilies to France, Monet wrote that his sight was failing so badly he would have to give up work. Cataracts were clouding his eyes and shifting the colours he saw. Clemenceau, his friend and the former prime minister, pressed him to have an operation, and in 1923 he did. A few months later he was painting again, and he kept reworking the huge canvases in his studio at Giverny until he died in December 1926. This composition, two panels joined into a band about eight and a half metres long, fills the western end of the second room. Its tone is among the darkest of the eight. The willows on the bank never appear, only their reflections, long vertical shadows of blue and violet running down through the water. Lily pads drift across it in dull blue-green, and a few small flowers, pink, white and yellow, catch what light there is. At the opposite end of the room hangs the longest composition of all, The Two Willows.