O lago dos nenúfares: harmonia verde

By 1899 Monet had turned part of his garden at Giverny into a subject he could paint for the rest of his life. He had bought the meadow below his house, dug out a pond, and diverted a small branch of a nearby river to feed it, after local officials worried his strange plants might poison the water. Over the pond he built an arched wooden footbridge, painted green, which everyone soon called the Japanese bridge. This is one of a dozen or so views he made of it that year, looking along the water toward a bank of willow and reeds. He showed the group in Paris the next year, the first public sight of the water garden that would occupy him for another 25 years.