Water Lilies

Monet painted this in 1919, the year after the First World War ended, when he was nearly 80 and his eyesight was clouding with cataracts. By then he rarely let recent work leave the garden at Giverny, but this is one of four water lily canvases he unusually chose to finish, sign, and sell that year. He told his dealers, the Bernheim brothers, that he was working on them passionately, and they bought all four at once. There is no horizon and no sky in the picture, only the surface of his pond, the lilies floating over reflected clouds. Monet would give almost all of his final years to this single subject.