Water Lilies

By 1915 Giverny had thinned out. Many villagers had left, most of the gardeners were conscripted, and Monet's younger son Michel was called up that year. Monet was 74, his eyes already unreliable after cataracts were diagnosed in 1912, and he stayed where he was and had builders put up a third studio in the garden, a plain hangar of a room big enough for canvases over two metres tall. Painting, he reckoned, was the useful thing he could still do while the war went on.

The great panels he prepared in there went to the French state after the Armistice and line two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris today. This canvas comes from the same stretch of work at the same pond, a metre and a half tall and two metres across. The Bavarian state collections bought it on the art market in 1978, more than 50 years after he painted it.