Water Lilies

Monet held on to this canvas for about 12 years. He painted it around 1908 at the lily pond in his garden at Giverny, and he let it go only in December 1920, at 80, while he was absorbed in the enormous water-lily panels he meant as a gift to the French state. Two Paris dealers, Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, bought it together and showed it in a Monet exhibition the next year. In July 1923 it went to Henri Canonne, a Paris pharmacist who had made his fortune with Valda, a eucalyptus and mint throat lozenge, and who came to own more than a dozen of Monet's water lilies. His son Jacques inherited it. In 2000 the American businessman William Koch bought it at Sotheby's in New York, and when he sent it back to the same saleroom in 2015 it sold for close to 34 million dollars.