The Water-lily Pond

Around 1917, with the war still going on, Monet was painting his water-lily pond at a scale he had never tried before. Two years earlier he had built a new studio at Giverny big enough for canvases two metres tall. This picture is three of them, each about three metres wide, set edge to edge into one stretch of water more than nine metres long, with no bank and no horizon. The clouds and the trailing willow appear only as reflections. It belongs to the same campaign as the great decorations Monet gave to France for the Orangerie in Paris. Ernst Beyeler, the Basel dealer who owned it, is said to have remarked that this triptych alone deserved a museum, and Renzo Piano's building in Riehen, opened in 1997, has a gallery long enough to hang it facing a lily pond outside the glass. The Fondation's own conservators count it among the few water-lily pictures that still keep their original colour and the raised relief of the brushwork.