During the last decade of his life, Monet worked almost exclusively within the confines of the elaborate garden that he had laid out on his estate in Giverny. Here you see a section of the flower garden proper: a pathway winding through two banks of bloom-laden irises.

During the last several years of his life, the aging Monet suffered from faltering eyesight, and it became difficult for him to distinguish between subtleties of form and color. He began to use increasingly bright, blatantly non-naturalistic colors, which he applied to the canvas with broad, sweeping swipes of his brush. His works of this period bordered on abstraction, and they gain a powerfully expressive quality that far outweighs any loss of observed exactness. In this late painting, for instance, it appears as if Monet tapped into some underlying force of nature, uncovering a primal energy that gives the blossoms and leaves of his irises a sense of pulsating life.