Waterlilies Pond, Green Reflection

This canvas is more than four metres wide, and it was never meant for an ordinary wall. The day after the armistice of November 1918 Monet offered the French state a set of large panels of his water garden at Giverny. He spent the rest of his life reworking them in a studio built for the purpose, painting with failing eyes. He had cataracts in both and was operated on in 1923. About 20 of the two-metre-high canvases were left out of the final installation at the Orangerie in Paris, and this is one of them. They stayed in the studio after his death in 1926, inherited by his son Michel, until the huge late pictures came back into favour after the Second World War. Emil Bührle bought this one in Zurich in May 1952, straight out of a Monet exhibition.