French Impressionist artist, Claude Monet (1840–1926), notably known for his masterpieces and his garden at Giverny, worked on and developed the garden that is the subject of the painting from the end of 1883 until the end of his life.

During the last two decades of his career, Monet devoted himself single-mindedly to painting the celebrated water-lily pond that he had designed and cultivated at his home in rural Giverny. In one extraordinary canvas after another, he captured the constantly shifting relationships among water, reflections, atmosphere, and light that transformed the pond’s surface with each passing moment.

The story of Monet’s water garden begins in 1883, when the artist and his family settled at Giverny, a tiny rural hamlet some forty miles northwest of Paris at the confluence of the Seine and the Epte. Monet found a large house to rent there on two acres of land; when the property came up for sale in 1890, he bought it at the asking price, “certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,” as he wrote to Durand-Ruel. A dedicated gardener all his life, Monet’s first priority upon purchasing the estate was to replace the vegetable plots in front of the house with flower beds. Three years later, he acquired an adjacent piece of land beside the river Ru and successfully applied to the local government for permission divert the tributary and dig a pond. The sheer beauty of Monet’s aquatic paradise also served the artist as a balm, especially during his traumatic times.