Monet's water lilies series

November 15, 1911

In his Giverny garden, a seventy-one-year-old Claude Monet began painting the water-lily pond as an immersive environment, not a view, working on canvases so large they wrapped around the viewer. The series would grow to dozens of enormous paintings destined for the Orangerie in Paris. Impressionism had reached the edge of abstraction, a decade before abstraction had a name.