Ninfee

In April 1922 Monet signed the deed that handed France the big water-lily panels, 22 of them, and then spent the next year barely able to trust his own eyes. Cataracts had pulled his colour vision out of true, and in January 1923 he finally let a surgeon operate. This canvas belongs to that late stretch of work at Giverny. Toledo's curators connect it to Morning, one of the compositions that ended up in the Orangerie in Paris, where the panels were installed in 1927, a year after he died. There is no bank, no horizon and no sky except the sky reflected in the pond, which is why the picture reads as close to abstract. He was working by then in a studio put up during the First World War for canvases too large to carry outside.