The Water Lilies, Green Reflections, left

Claude Monet built his own pond at Giverny and then spent the last decades of his life painting it over and over. This canvas is the left half of a panel called Green Reflections, part of his enormous Water Lilies series. Rather than showing us a shoreline or a strip of sky, Monet points our gaze straight down at the water. Lily pads drift across the surface while trees and clouds appear only as reflections, breaking apart into pools of green, blue, and shadowy depths. The effect is a little disorienting and completely absorbing, like floating over a pond with nothing solid to hold onto.

When Monet made these giant paintings, his eyes were clouded by cataracts, which many believe shaped the soft, blurred way the colors melt into each other. He worked on them for years, constantly reworking and refining, and eventually gave a whole set to France as a gift after the trauma of the First World War. Those murals now live in two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris, arranged so visitors can sit right in the middle and feel surrounded by water. Monet imagined them as a calm shelter, a quiet spot for tired eyes and busy minds to settle.