1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle featuring the Japanese Footbridge (detail), 1899, by Claude Monet (French, 18401926)Monet began to paint the lily pond in his garden at Giverny while he was completing his series of Rouen Cathedral. In the last decades of his life, his prized water garden and the footbridge he built over it became his most importantand eventually onlysubject. He began construction of the water garden as soon as he moved to Giverny, petitioning local authorities to divert water from the nearby river. Monet remade the landscape with the same artifice he applied to his paintingsand then he used it, in turn, as his creative focus.The reflective surface of the pond, like the atmospheric envelope Monet wrapped around the cathedrals and other series subjects, unified his canvases. The sky has already disappeared from this painting; the lush foliage rises all the way to the horizon and space is flattened by the decorative arch of the bridge. Our atten