The Water Lily Pond

On 30 April 1918 Monet ordered a batch of stretched canvases a metre high and two metres wide. As they arrived he set up at the edge of the water garden at Giverny and began a new group of lily pictures at that size, and this is one of them, 100 by 201 centimetres. That summer the German advance came to within about 50 kilometres of the village, near enough that the guns were audible in the garden, and much of Giverny packed up and left. Monet was 77 and stayed. His younger son Michel was at the front. The armistice was signed on 11 November, and the day after it he wrote to Georges Clemenceau, the head of the French government and a friend of 40 years, offering two of these large panels to the state.