Ninfee

Monet painted this in 1916, in his 70s, while the First World War ground on not far to the north of his garden at Giverny; several of the young gardeners who tended his lily pond had gone to the front. The huge lily panels he made in these years he mostly kept, meaning them as one great decoration to be handed to France. This canvas is the rare exception he sold. A Japanese industrialist, Kojiro Matsukata, was allowed to carry one off after visiting the studio around 1921. His collection was seized by the French government during the next war and only sent on to Japan in 1959, which is how a Giverny lily pond ended up anchoring a museum in Tokyo.