Water Lilies

On 10 December 1909 Alexander Cochrane, a Scottish-born chemical manufacturer living in Boston, bought this canvas from Monet's dealer, Durand-Ruel. He sold it back 11 days later. That same month he bought another of Monet's water-lily paintings, one dated 1907, and that one he kept. Both now belong to the Museum of Fine Arts. Monet signed and dated this one 1905 at the lower right, two years into his pictures of the pond at Giverny. The museum describes how it works. The lily pads scattered across the canvas mark the surface of the water and lead the eye back into depth. Beneath them a pattern of light and dark is the reflection of the sky and of trees on a far bank that never appears in the picture. When these paintings were exhibited, critics compared them to poetry and to music. In 1911 Durand-Ruel sold the canvas to another Boston collector, and it reached the museum in 1939 as a gift from her son, Edward Jackson Holmes, who had run the museum as its director.