Monet’s paintings of his garden and water-lilies at Giverny occupied him for many years in the last twenty years of his life, and they were his last great works. By the end of 1890, Monet was making enough from the sales of his pictures to buy his house at Giverny, not far from Paris. After settling in, he began to make improvements to the garden, including the addition of a pond with water lilies floating over it and a Japanese-style bridge arching over water and vegetation. His first paintings of the water-garden, executed between 1899 and 1900, give prominence to the bridge, water-lilies and the weeping willows growing by the side. These pictures formed a quiet beginning to what was to become an increasingly exciting enterprise for Monet.

In the next phase of his garden paintings, produced between 1903 and 1908, Monet dispensed with the bridge and set his angle of vision nearer to the water surface. The pond became a sort of mirror holding the shifting reflections of the sky and floral as the color and quality of light changed throughout the day. In her short novel, Light, Eva imagines the artist’s mood as he follows the quality of the changing light around the garden in the course of a single day.

“He strolled along the grass verge, saying his habitual goodbye to shrubs and trees, now glowing in a final incandescence he had not captured; not yet. He had been wrong to think of light as a veil, playful and shimmering, between him and solid things. That was how a young man saw things, in mid-summer and midday. But now, especially in the early morning and in the evening, he saw it for the illusion it was. He had to look through things now, since nothing is solid, to show light and those things it illumines are both tran-substantial, both tenuous”

~Eva Figes, Light (1983)

Watch: Monet’s Garden at Giverny