Nymphéas (Agapanthes)

Monet began this around 1915, a year into a war whose front line was close enough to Giverny that he could hear the artillery from his garden. He was in his mid-seventies, and rather than move away he had a third studio built on the property, a shed big enough to take canvases over four metres wide. This is the left panel of a triptych of his lily pond, one of about 48 large water-landscapes he worked on in that room, going back to them again and again. He was still adjusting them when he died in 1926. The three Agapanthus panels were sold separately in the 1950s, to museums in Cleveland, Saint Louis and Kansas City, and they have been brought back together only a handful of times since.