Water Lilies

By 1907 Monet had been painting the same lily pond in his garden at Giverny for the better part of a decade, and that summer he grew so dissatisfied that he scraped down and destroyed several of the canvases before anyone could see them. This one survived. It is round, a tondo, a format he tried only a handful of times for the pond. The circle cuts away the horizon and the far bank completely, so you look straight down at the water, the floating leaves, and the sky caught on the surface, with no edge to tell you where the pond ends. Two other round versions from these years hang in Houston and in Vernon.