Claude Monet, the French painter who helped found Impressionism, painted water lilies because the pond at Giverny, his home in Normandy, was his own creation. Flowers, sky and light moved together on its surface, and he never tired of looking at them. From the late 1890s until his death in 1926, he painted it almost 300 times.
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In 1883 Monet moved into a house in Giverny, a village about an hour from Paris. Ten years later he bought a meadow below the house, on the other side of the road and of the railway line that ran beside it, and decided to dig a pond there.
He wanted flowers, not a subject. The writer Marc Elder, who wrote down his talks with the painter at Giverny in 1924, heard him say of the water lilies, whose round leaves float flat on the water: "I planted them for pleasure." Painting them came later: "It took me some time to understand my waterlilies."
The council, the neighbors and the pond
To fill the pond, Monet had to take water from a stream that other people used, and for that he needed permission. Two groups stood in his way, first the village council and then his own neighbors…
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