Weeping Willow

Monet painted this weeping willow at Giverny in 1918, in the last months of the First World War. The front was close enough that he could sometimes hear the guns, his surviving son was serving in constant danger, and most of his household had left. He was in his late seventies and nearly the whole garden staff was gone. He returned again and again to a single willow at the edge of his water-lily pond, making about ten of these canvases, their branches knotted and their colours bruised and dark. Painters and critics have read the whole group as his private mourning for the war's dead. This one is now in the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.