Water Lilies

In August 1897 the journalist Maurice Guillemot visited Monet at Giverny and later described an idea the painter was turning over, a round room whose walls would be lined with painted water and floating lilies stretching to the horizon. Monet was already testing the idea on ordinary easel canvases, and this is one of eight from that first attempt, painted between about 1897 and 1899. The picture leaves out the bank and the sky altogether. What remains is the surface of the pond, the flat pads and three pale pink flowers. In 1914, when he at last began the huge decoration he had talked about, Monet brought these early trials back out of storage, and a photograph published that year shows him in his studio with this one. It stayed with his son Michel and later passed through dealers in Paris and London before the gallery in Rome bought it in 1962.