To celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2025 the National Gallery in London commissioned a short series of books on some of their most famous and beloved paintings—including this one on Claude Monet’s 1899 masterpiece The Water-Lily Pond. I look at how Monet came to construct his water lily pond beside his house in Giverny and then populate it with beautiful aquatic plants that he then spent much of the rest of his life cultivating and, of course, painting. The National Gallery’s painting represents one of his first attempts to come to terms with the motif that would obsess him for the last 25 years of his life—and that continue to obsess us today.
Purchase from The National Gallery Shop