睡莲

Monet was 75 and could hear the guns from his garden. Much of Giverny left in 1914, he stayed, and in 1915 he began building a third studio there, a shed about 23 metres long, finished in the spring of 1916 so that he could work on canvases two metres high. His younger son Michel had been called up. What he painted inside it was the pond at the bottom of that same garden, over and over, at the scale of a wall, and this is one of them, about a metre and a half by two. It stayed in the family until 1966, when Michel left everything at Giverny to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and roughly a hundred Monets arrived at the Marmottan, a small Paris house museum known until then for its Empire furniture.