Water Lilies

In June 1909 the critic Roger Marx published a conversation with Monet in the Paris art journal the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and in it Monet talked about the art of Japan. What he valued in it, he said, was an aesthetic that evokes presence through shadow and the whole through the part. The Museum of Fine Arts uses those words for this canvas, painted two years earlier on the water garden at Giverny. The banks of the pond, the trees growing on them and the sky above are all suggested, yet only as reflections on the surface among the lily pads. None of them is painted directly. Monet had begun this run of pond pictures in 1903, and this one was among the 48 he showed in Paris in May 1909, the month before the article appeared. The canvas is almost square, about a metre each way, and he signed and dated it 1907 at the lower right. A Boston collector bought it that December, and in 1919 it came to the museum with his bequest.