The Water Lily Pond

From 22 November to 15 December 1900, Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris showed a group of recent Monets, among them views of the pond in his garden at Giverny. The critic Gustave Geffroy reviewed the show in the newspaper Le Journal and wrote of a calm pool, still and deep like a mirror, where white water lilies opened, ringed by soft hanging greenery that was reflected in it. That December Monet sold this canvas, signed and dated 1900 at the lower left. He had bought his house at Giverny in 1890 and soon afterwards added a plot of land below it, where he made the water garden, with a Japanese bridge across the pond at its narrowest point. The Museum of Fine Arts counts this picture among the first in which he gave real weight to the reflections of the bank and the sky on the flat surface of the water. It stayed in Paris for a quarter of a century. Then a Boston collector, Alvan T. Fuller, at the time governor of Massachusetts, bought it and lent it to the museum in January 1927, and his family foundation gave it in 1961.