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In 1864 Monet was 23 and nobody in particular, a student who had recently left a Paris teaching studio to go and paint on the Normandy coast. Getting anywhere meant showing he could handle a respectable subject, so he made this bank of spring flowers, peonies and lilacs and hydrangeas spilling forward out of a dark ground, every petal set down with careful, almost botanical attention. There is nothing loose or hazy here. It is a young man proving what his hand could do. He once said he owed becoming a painter to flowers, and decades on he was still at it, building the water garden at Giverny that would fill his final canvases.