The water in the Water Lilies is not a view Monet came across. He bought the house at Giverny in 1890, had a pond dug in the garden about three years later, diverted a stream to fill it and planted it. Then he painted that one piece of water for the rest of his life.
A subject built to order
The early pictures take in the banks of the pond and the wooden Japanese bridge. The second kind, the water landscapes of 1903 to 1908, throw the land and the sky away and keep only the surface. The Art Institute's canvas of 1906 belongs to that group: nearly square, about ninety centimetres each way, lilies at the bottom left and top right framing a path of open water with trees and clouds lying in it. Nothing in it says where the viewer is standing or how deep the water goes. He called the series an obsession, and examination of this canvas shows how much he changed while it was in progress. He sold it to Durand-Ruel in 1909 for fourteen thousand francs; it reached a Chicago collector in 1914 for five thousand dollars, and the museum in 1933.
The day after the Armistice
In 1914 he was seventy-four and had just lost his son. He decided to work at the scale he had been describing since 1909, when he told a friend he wanted the water lilies carried along the walls, and in 1916 he had a studio built big enough for it, lit through the roof. On 12 November 1918, the day after the Armistice, he wrote to Georges Clemenceau: he was close to finishing two decorative panels, he wanted to sign them on Victory Day, and he was asking Clemenceau to offer them to the state on his behalf. He meant them as a monument to peace. A gift of two panels became, under Clemenceau's persuasion, the whole cycle — twelve panels agreed in September 1920, the gift made official in 1922.
One eye, January 1923
Cataracts were diagnosed in 1912. By the early twenties he was working through a brown-yellow fog, and his judgement of colour had moved with it. Doctor Coutela operated on the right eye in January 1923, and afterwards what Monet saw and what he had been painting no longer agreed; he destroyed work from the cataract years rather than let it stand. There were close to three hundred water lily paintings by the end, more than forty of them at mural size. He died in December 1926, at eighty-six. The panels went into two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris the next year, laid out as a frieze with almost no joins, the way he had asked. He never saw the rooms finished.
He had the pond dug before he painted it. Everything after that is the same few square metres of water.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.