Ninfee

By 1903 Monet had taken the Japanese footbridge out of his pond pictures and begun painting the water by itself, with no bank and no horizon to place you. He had dug the pond ten years earlier at Giverny, over the objections of neighbours who were convinced the plants he was importing would poison the stream they drew their water from. When the results finally went on show in 1909 at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris, there were 48 canvases, and the earliest of them carried the date 1903. This one stayed in the family. Michel Monet, the painter's surviving son, kept what was left in the studio and made the Marmottan his sole legatee when he died in a car crash in 1966. More than a hundred Monets arrived at the museum at once.