Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)

Eight mural-scale canvases wrap two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in a continuous panorama of Monet's pond at Giverny — water, sky, clouds, and willows dissolving into one another with no horizon line. Painted between 1914 and 1926 while the artist's eyesight failed, and installed in 1927, months after his death, as his gift to France, the cycle is the summation of Impressionism and a doorway to abstraction. Monet asked for 'the illusion of an endless whole,' and the rooms remain painting's most complete immersive environment.