Claude Monet - Agapanthus Button

Agapanthus (Les Agapanthes), 1914-1917 - Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) was a French Impressionist painter. Monet returned intensively to his Giverny gardens during the First World War while developing the monumental water-lily decorations that occupied his final years. This agapanthus canvas is two metres high, a scale he was testing in several large studies of the water garden in those years. The close view allows leaves and blossoms to spread across the surface with little conventional depth. Rather than a botanical record, the plant becomes a vehicle for rhythm and color. The flower mattered to Monet: he gave the title Agapanthus to one of his monumental water-lily triptychs, whose first state was photographed in 1921.