Water-Lilies

By 1917 Claude Monet was in his late seventies, and the war was close enough that on quiet days the artillery at the front could be heard in his garden at Giverny. He painted none of it. Instead he spent those years bent over a pond he had dug himself, recording nothing but the surface of the water. There is no horizon here, no bank, and no sky except where it falls as a reflection. The lilies rest on a green depth that could be a few centimetres or several metres. By now cataracts were clouding his sight, and his brushwork had loosened into broad, soft strokes. The canvas stayed in the family until 1966, when his son Michel left it, together with the largest collection of Monet's work anywhere, to the Musée Marmottan in Paris.