Claude Monet - Water Lilies / Nympheas Skateboard

Water Lilies (Nymphéas), 1916 - Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) was a French Impressionist painter. In 1916, Monet was deeply engaged with the renewed water-lily project that would occupy the final decade of his life. He no longer needed the bridge or shoreline to identify the garden. Instead, clusters of lilies and reflections structure a surface that can be read simultaneously as water and as paint. The canvas is square, about two metres on each side, a scale that anticipates the grandes décorations. It was acquired by the Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata, placed under French state sequestration in 1944 and returned to Japan in 1959. Repetition did not produce identical pictures; each canvas rebalanced color, reflected vegetation and the uncertain depth of the pond.