3, 4) other examples from his 1899 series include paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Pushkin Museum, Moscow Musée d’Orsay, Paris National Gallery, London Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Cairo and private collections. The Picture: The Met’s 1899 picture is similar in composition and colors to two others of that year in the National Gallery, London, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (figs. After a final enlargement of the water garden due to flooding in 1910, he undertook a third group in the years during and after the First World War, comprising the large decorations for the two oval rooms at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. The painter returned to the motif after modifying the pond again, with a second series created between 19 and exhibited in 1909. He also added a framework to the bridge for wisteria and planted bamboo, Japanese apple and cherry trees as well as rhododendrons, in addition to the large willow and poplar trees that were already there. In 1901, after this initial series, he purchased more of the marshy land adjacent to the pond and enlarged it by diverting water from the stream. In The Met’s canvas, the bridge is front and center, much larger than the bridge of his first forays into the subject.

He had spent the warm-weather months of 1899 devoted to the series, as his letters of that summer attest. Monet returned in a concerted way to depict the bridge over his pond in eighteen canvases of 1899–1900 and exhibited twelve of them all with similar titles at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in 1900. He installed a Japanese-style footbridge over the pond late that year following the same axis as his main garden path and first painted the motif in three canvases of 1895 before planting water lilies (see figs. His intention was to construct something 'for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint' (quoted in Tucker 1990, p. Thirty-one years earlier, in 1893, the painter bought a small piece of land across the railroad tracks from his property at Giverny that included a small pond formed by water from the Ru stream, a diversion of the Epte river (a tributary of the Seine). Since then I’ve hardly had any other subject,' Claude Monet told Marc Elder in 1924. And then all of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.

'A landscape does not get under your skin in one day.

Bride Tree by J.P. Robinson