Looking Through Monet’s Window

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to visit Monet’s house outside of Paris. Although the gardens were beautiful, most of the pictures I took there were not. However, I did take one picture that I liked very much. It’s a shot looking through a window of his house out onto the pond at the center of his enormous garden. No doubt, he sat at this very window painting many of his Water Lilies paintings. You can just see them in the background, floating on the water. I never really knew what to do with it because it really doesn’t scream out “MONET!”

If I didn’t know this was Monet’s window, I would have thought this would look better with most of the color washed out. Like this:

But given what I know about where it was taken, this doesn’t really work for me, either. Monet was about color! So, to try to capture some of that, here are some lilies. They really don’t do the garden justice. But maybe they will help you to imagine yourself looking through that window, sipping a glass of wine, just watching him paint.