White and Yellow Water Lilies

Monet had a third studio put up at Giverny in 1915, a shed of a building over 20 metres long, because the pictures he now wanted to make no longer fitted the room he had. France was at war. His younger son Michel was in uniform, and Monet wrote that from the garden he could hear the guns. This square canvas, two metres on each side, belongs to that work, the pond paintings he called his grande decoration. Winterthur's art society bought it and handed it to the Kunstmuseum in 1952, three years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a large water lily picture of its own.