ANN TEMKIN: This painting is probably one that Monet made outdoors while he was able to paint right at the pond, in the warm weather. And it's not as heavily worked as the large panels. It's not something that he spent years and years returning to. He made many, many works of this sort at about this size, trying to get the feeling, just looking again and again and transcribing onto canvas, the flowers, the lilies, the surrounding foliage, the water. This was something that he had an insatiable appetite for working on, and no matter how many canvases he had to fill, how many hours in the day, it was never enough for him to work out what he was trying to get at.
And, when you look at this painting, when you look at the other one on view across the room, you realize each time he was getting at something different, depending on where he was standing, the time of day, the weather that day, there were always an infinite amount of variables. It makes you realize that with the repeated painting campaigns he achieved the level of abstraction that those final large canvases have.