Water Lilies

By 1904 Monet had stopped chasing weather across France. In his sixties, he painted a subject he had built himself: a pond at Giverny, fed by water he got permission to divert from a small river, planted with lilies and crossed by a Japanese-style bridge. He worked it obsessively, keeping several easels going at once around the bank. In this canvas the bank is gone. There is no horizon and no shoreline, only the surface of the water with the lilies on it and the sky arriving as reflection. It was one of 48 such pictures he showed together in Paris in 1909. It now hangs in Le Havre, the port town where he grew up and where, decades earlier, a harbour at sunrise had given Impressionism its name.