Nymphéas

Monet painted his water garden right through the First World War, from a large studio at Giverny that stood close enough to the front for him to hear the guns on quiet days. In 1918, the year this canvas belongs to, the fighting finally stopped, and the day after the Armistice Monet wrote to his old friend Georges Clemenceau, then France's prime minister, offering panels of water lilies to the nation as a monument to peace. His own eyesight was clouding with cataracts by this point. He painted only the surface of the pond here, with no sky and no far bank to steady the eye.