Ninfee

Monet painted this while the First World War was being fought within earshot of his garden. He refused to leave Giverny as others fled, and in 1916, at 75, he had a big new studio built so he could work on canvases far larger than anything he had tried before, some of them over four metres wide. His eyesight was beginning to fail with cataracts, yet he kept circling the same lily pond, dropping the horizon and the banks entirely so that water fills the whole surface and there is no ground to stand on. He gave 22 of these huge panels to the French state as a monument after the war. This one stayed behind at Giverny and did not leave for years. Up close the flowers dissolve into loose trails of violet, green and pink.