Waterlilies

Monet painted this between 1917 and 1919 at Giverny. The front was about 50 kilometres away and the guns were audible in the garden. His son Michel had been called up in 1915, and in the summer of that year Monet had a new studio put up beside the house, big enough for the enormous water lily panels he had started. On 12 November 1918, the day after the armistice, he wrote to Georges Clemenceau, an old friend then running the French government, and offered two of those panels to the state to mark the victory. This canvas comes out of the same years and the same ambition, two metres wide and one metre high. It carries no bank and no horizon, only the surface of the pond, the pads lying on it and the plants and sky arriving as reflections.