After decades as a masterful landscape artist, Claude Monet found his ideal subject in the lily ponds of his retreat at Giverny, which inspired him to make some of the most exquisite—and stylistically adventurous—paintings of the early 20th century. Books often fail to give a full sense of the Frenchman's late murals, but the 150 color reproductions here—many spanning two pages—depict many of these timeless works both as they appear in a museum gallery and also in close-up. Among the paintings here are the monumental Water Lilies: Morning; The Clouds, in which deep green shadow falls across the water; and the 1922 version of The Japanese Bridge, a riot of abstracted colors that essentially become the subject of the picture.
