AGAPANTHUS
CLAUDE MONET, 1914-26
Look at those stems lean. Long ones, arcing out over the water, just leaning. The whole thing's a wall of green, with these soft purple blooms tipping out over it. Those are agapanthus. African lily. Lily of the Nile. Monet planted them himself, right there on the bank. Maybe just because he loved the way they leaned. And here's the thing. This painting doesn't start in his head. It starts in the dirt. Him at Giverny, planting something years before the painting needed it, so one day a flower would lean exactly that way over the water. He's in his seventies, and his eyes are failing. Cataracts. He works in a straw hat and tinted glasses, coaxing paintings out of eyes he can barely trust. Then surgery. His vision changes. The colors shift. And instead of stopping, he goes back into paintings he'd already finished and does them over. Some of this has been seen by two different versions of his own eye. And the whole time, there's a war on. By the end of it, the man leading France is Georges Clemenceau. Also Monet's dearest friend. The two of them, out in the garden, talking about lilies, while France bleeds. When it's over, it's Clemenceau who fights to give these paintings a home. Monet dies before it opens. So slow down with it for a second. An old, near-blind man at the edge of a pond, getting the lean of a flower exactly right, while the whole century roars past behind him. Hard to call that hiding. Looks more like a man loving one corner of the world as hard as anyone can. And the lean outlasts the war. Outlasts him. The lean is still there.