Nenúfares

By 1904 Claude Monet had mostly stopped chasing motifs across France and turned to a pond he had dug himself. At Giverny he had diverted a small river, planted water lilies, and thrown a Japanese bridge across it, and for the rest of his life this garden was very nearly his only subject. In pictures like this the usual anchors of a landscape are gone. There is no horizon and no far bank, only the surface of the water, the floating pads, and the sky arriving upside down as a reflection. He painted dozens of these in a few years and showed a group of them in Paris in 1909. The pond outlived him and can still be visited at Giverny.