The waterlilies that Monet cultivated in his ponds became something of an obsession and in his struggle to represent them he painted them over 300 times.
The waterlilies that Monet cultivated in his ponds became something of an obsession and in his struggle to represent them he painted them over 300 times. The last project of his long life was to create 40 vast panels which required him to create a special studio at Giverny to house them. They are displayed in the Orangerie museum in Paris in a specially adapted oval gallery over 100 metres long and 2 metres high, and as you contemplate them and tip into that abstract world behind and beyond the waterlilies, you realise that we have gone one step beyond representative art into the abstract.