Wisteria

Cascading blossoms of purple and green spill across the top of this canvas, hanging like a floral curtain over a wide sweep of shimmering blue. Claude Monet painted "Wisteria" around 1925, during the last stretch of his life at his beloved garden in Giverny. He designed it to sit above his enormous water lily murals, acting as a blooming crown for the whole display. The blue below the flowers is hard to pin down. It might be sky, it might be water, or it might just be color for its own sake.

Monet was in his eighties when he made this, and cataracts had clouded his eyes and shifted the way he saw color. Many think that is why his late works feel so loose and blurry, with shapes dissolving into one another. Others simply see an old master who had stopped worrying about tidy details. Either way, the painting leans toward the abstract art that would appear many years later, feeling more like a mood of light and growth than a portrait of a plant.

A founder of Impressionism, Monet spent decades studying how sunlight played across nature. Near the finish of his long career, he seems to have loosened his grip on the real world almost completely, letting the brush follow feeling instead of fact. The wisteria reads as a soft goodbye from an artist who found endless wonder just beyond his own door.