Nymphéas blancs

In 1900 the Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin bought this canvas from Monet himself, a year after it was painted. Shchukin had made his money in textiles, and he hung his French pictures in the family palace in the centre of Moscow and opened the rooms to visitors on Sundays, so that young Russian painters could see what Paris was doing without leaving the country. The painting belongs to a group of about a dozen that Monet made in 1899 of one corner of his pond at Giverny, taking the footbridge from almost the same spot each time and changing little but the hour. Shchukin's collection was nationalised after 1918. This one went first to the state museum of new western art in Moscow, and when that museum was dissolved in 1948 it came to the Pushkin.