Water-Lilies, Setting Sun

This canvas came to the National Gallery in 2006, left to it by Simon Sainsbury, a collector from the supermarket family who, with his brothers, had paid for the gallery's Sainsbury Wing. Monet painted it around 1907 at the lily pond he had made in his garden at Giverny, and it stayed with him until August 1923, when he sold it to the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune. By then he was 82. That year he finally had his cataracts operated on, and he was still working on the huge water-lily panels he had promised to the French state. The picture shows no bank and no sky. The sunset arrives only as pink and yellow light on the water, and the weeping willows appear only as reflections, dark vertical streaks falling through the flat pads. In the lower left corner a clump of plants gives the eye its one fixed point.