My Garden Is My Most Beautiful

Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and spent the following four decades methodically creating the garden that would become the subject of his most celebrated late paintings. He designed it himself in two parts: a flower garden in front of the house and a water garden across the road, for which he diverted a stream to create the famous pond. The Nymphéas series — over 250 paintings of water lilies, eventually executed on enormous canvases — grew directly from this "masterpiece." He worked on them until his death in 1926, even as his eyesight deteriorated from cataracts.