Water Lilies

Lily pads and their reflections spread across the canvas with no horizon, no shoreline and no sky to orient the eye — only water, colour and light. Monet built a Japanese-style pond at his home in Giverny specifically to paint it, returning to the subject in over 250 canvases across the last three decades of his life. Up close the water dissolves into pure brushwork; from a distance it reassembles into a garden.