In the last thirty years of his life, Claude Monet created more than 250 paintings of his water garden at Giverny. The earlier works focused on a Japanese-style footbridge, but later paintings abandoned solid ground in favor of immersive, watery scenes. In this painting, which is devoid of a horizon line, the subject is not so much the water lilies but the reflections mirrored on the pond’s surface. The extraordinary clarity of the reflected clouds caused those attending the painting’s 1917 auction to think that the canvas was hanging upside down.