Claude Monet did not find his subject, he built it. In 1893 he bought a strip of land across the road from his house in Giverny and asked the authorities for permission to divert a small stream into a pond. Local people objected, fearing the foreign plants he wanted to grow would poison the water. He got his permit, built a Japanese-style footbridge over it, and filled it with water lilies.
For the next three decades, the pond was almost the only thing he painted. He made around 250 canvases of water lilies. The series moves from picture-postcard views, with the bridge and the banks in view, toward something stranger: by the time of paintings like this one around 1906, the edges have vanished, the horizon is gone, and the surface of the water has become the entire picture. There is no sky except the reflection.
Monet wrote that he was after an instant, something fleeting, and the water was perfect for it. The light changes by the minute, and the reflections of clouds, trees and sky drift over the lilies. A pond is a mirror, and he painted the mirror.
Late in life his eyesight faded. He developed cataracts, and his colors turned muddy and red, until he had an operation in 1923 that partly restored his vision. He kept painting.
After the end of the First World War he offered the French state a huge gift, a series of enormous water lily panels, to be installed in a room at the Orangerie in Paris. They opened in 1927, a few months after Monet's death, and are often seen as the first immersive artwork. Paintings of the same subject, though, hang in museums all over the world, including this one at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Monet's Water Lilies appears on our: