Weeping Willow and the Water-Lily Pond

When war broke out in 1914, Claude Monet's house at Giverny emptied. Family and servants were called up or moved away from the German advance, and his only surviving son, Michel, served at the front. Monet stayed, and at times he could hear the artillery. In those years he kept returning to the weeping willow on the bank of his water-lily pond, a tree traditionally read as a sign of mourning. This canvas, painted sometime between 1916 and 1919 and almost two metres high, belongs to the great water-lily decoration that occupied him until his death. It went to Michel, and in the 1950s it passed to the Paris gallery of Katia Granoff, then to American collectors. It had never been shown in public when Christie's put it on view in London in February 2019, estimated at more than 40 million pounds, and it did not sell.