Claude Monet
Water Lilies (Monet)
1916
One of Claude Monet's large 'Water Lilies' canvases painted at Giverny between 1914 and 1926, now held by the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. It is a centrepiece of the Matsukata Collection, assembled directly from Monet by the Japanese shipping magnate Kōjirō Matsukata in the years after the First World War. Surface and sky dissolve into a near-abstract field of reflections and brushwork. Preserved through the Second World War in France and ceded by the French government in 1959 as a 'national gift', it helped form the founding display of the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno and remains an emblem of Japan's modern encounter with European painting.
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Image source: Wikimedia Commons