Monet's water garden did not exist before he made it. After settling at Giverny in 1883, he bought the neighbouring plot a decade later specifically because it held a pond, then diverted a stream to feed it, planted water lilies and other aquatic plants, and built the arched Japanese-style bridge that appears across many of his paintings of the site^[1]. The garden functioned less as a backdrop to his painting than as raw material for it, cultivated and adjusted over years the way another artist might rework a canvas. From the late 1890s until his death, the pond became what one account calls the principal preoccupation of the last twenty-six years of his life, painted in countless different light effects across seasons and times of day^[2].

Much of Monet's late water lily work was made against worsening eyesight. He was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes around 1912, delayed surgery for years out of fear of losing the ability to paint at all, and eventually complained that he had to rely on the labels on his paint tubes rather than the colours themselves, sometimes using unduly dark tones without realising it^[3]. He established a working method to cope: painting smaller sketches directly in front of the pond during spring and summer, then returning in the studio through autumn and winter to work on the large decorative panels, of which he might have as many as fifty in progress at any one time^[4]. Despite the difficulty, he described work itself as his truest consolation, particularly after the deaths of his wife Alice in 1911 and his son Jean in 1914, writing to his dealer that returning to the pond each summer restored his sight and his morale together^[1].

Monet was notoriously reluctant to part with his late work, and the market-oriented paintings he did release, a small group of Water Lilies canvases sold to the dealers Bernheim-Jeune in 1919, were treated by contemporaries as a genuine event: only four of eleven recorded canvases in that particular group were sold, and Monet himself described them as a form of repose from the larger Decorations he was keeping to himself^[4]. The Grandes Decorations were negotiated as a gift to the French state, championed by his friend Georges Clemenceau, who secured the Orangerie as their permanent home only after Monet insisted the rooms be built as ovals rather than straight galleries^[5]. Monet never saw the finished installation. The panels were mounted on the Orangerie's curved walls in April 1927, four months after his death, and the display fell into critical neglect for decades before being rediscovered in the 1950s by artists including Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, who read in Monet's late, dissolving forms an anticipation of abstract painting^[3].