Waterlilies

Monet signed and dated this in 1906, one of the water-lily canvases he was making at Giverny, where he had dug and planted a pond on purpose so that he could paint it for the rest of his life. By this point he had stopped putting a horizon or a bank in these pictures. You are looking straight down at the water, at the lily pads and the sky reflected in it, with nothing to tell you where the pond ends. What is unusual is where the picture hangs now. In 1913 it was bought in Paris by Gwendoline Davies, a young Welshwoman from a coal-and-shipping fortune who, with her sister Margaret, was collecting Monet when almost no one in Britain was. The sisters eventually gave around 260 works to the nation, and their Monets became the core of the Impressionist collection in Cardiff. Three of their paintings are water lilies, and this is one of them.