ANN TEMKIN: This painting gives you a good idea of how Monet worked in between the smaller canvases and the large ones. Here he's really zeroing in on the surface of the water and an area of lily pads. And his looking is inviting you to do that same kind of looking at the painting surface as he's doing as a painter looking at the pond surface.
A lot of what Monet was up to was trying to put you in his place, and to transfer to the viewer the experience he was having as an artist. And so the sense of activity of painting, and the sense of immersion and the sense of examination of these fairly ordinary, unimportant, unsensational subjects is almost a form of religiosity for him. It’s this idea of paying attention to one's environment, that is the work of the artist and that can become the work of the viewer in such a way that it gives the viewer the same enormous pleasure that it gave the artist.