MONET

The garden paintings, of which three hundred works depict the lily pond, are regarded as Claude Monet's chef-d'oeuvre. The artist co mmenced these works in the 1890s but produced the majority of the paintings during the final two decades of his life. His early pain tings of the lily pond embraced the conventional spatial boundaries of water, surrounding land and horizon. Yet the longer Monet wor ked, the more the boundaries began to blur, until the pond became the universe: its scope immeasurable and defined exclusively by li ght.