The Water Lily Pond

Monet signed and dated this canvas 1904, and then kept it at Giverny for five more years. He had been promising his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel a show of the water-lily pictures for a long time, and kept putting it off, reworking canvases and destroying the ones he was unhappy with. When the exhibition finally opened in Paris in May 1909, under the title Water Lilies, a Series of Waterscapes, this painting hung as number three. Durand-Ruel and the Bernheim-Jeune gallery bought it together on 3 June, while the show was still on. Here the pond still has a far bank, a band of grass and shrubs along the top edge, and no sky at all. After passing between the dealers' Paris and New York branches, it went to a Denver collector, Katherine Wolcott Toll, and the Denver Art Museum bought it in 1935.