Waterlilies

In 1903 Monet was busy with two very different sets of pictures at Giverny. Indoors he was still reworking his views of the Thames, begun on three stays in London between 1899 and 1901, for a show the dealer Durand-Ruel would open in Paris the next spring. Outside lay the pond, and this canvas shows only its surface, with no bank and no sky except what the water gives back. Pads with white, yellow and pink blooms drift across it, and willow fronds trail in at the upper left. Monet signed and dated it at the lower left. It came to Ohio in 1953, when Esther Seaver, then director of the Dayton Art Institute, persuaded Joseph Rubin, who ran a New York dress company, to give it. For the museum's centenary in 2019 it was shown with a Waterloo Bridge that Monet had also dated 1903, lent by the Denver Art Museum.