Water-Lilies, Setting Sun, c.1907 by Claude Monet
Canvas Print - 10599-MCL

Sunset does not arrive here so much as it seeps – pink and buttery yellow bleeding across the pond's skin in the upper left, while the rest of the canvas holds onto the smoky purples and browns of dusk. Look for a horizon. There isn't one. Claude Monet has tilted the whole world downward so that we stare into water as if leaning over the edge of a rowboat, and what we see is not the sky itself but its ghost, caught on a surface that behaves like a mirror and a window at once.

The lily pads drift in horizontal clusters, quick strokes of viridian and rust laid over deeper pools of aubergine. Against them fall the vertical reflections of weeping willows – long dark verticals that pull the eye downward into imagined depth. That tension between the pads floating flat and the trees plunging down is the painting's quiet engine. It shouldn't work. It does.

In the lower left, a clump of reeds and grasses rises with a springy, almost calligraphic energy, the brush moving so fast you can feel the wrist behind it. These blades were, apparently, a later addition; a studio photograph from around 1907 shows the canvas without them. Knowing this makes them feel even more alive – a decision made after long looking, a small anchor thrown into a composition that might otherwise dissolve completely. They also nod, unmistakably, toward the Japanese brush painting Monet admired and collected.

The surface itself repays slow attention. Paint has been dragged, dabbed, scumbled and layered until the water seems both perfectly still and quietly moving. In the pale corner where the sun burns through, the pigment thickens into something almost creamy, warm as skin. Elsewhere it thins to bruised violet. One can almost smell the pond weed and hear the low hum of a summer evening ending.

This canvas belongs to the great sequence Monet made at Giverny between 1902 and 1908, when he stripped away bridge, bank and tree line to concentrate entirely on the water's shifting face. Forty-eight of these were shown at Durand-Ruel in 1909 and left critics reaching for the word abstraction. Marcel Proust saw that exhibition, and the waterlilies of the Vivonne in Swann's Way carry its afterimage – strawberry-red hearts inside white petals, water going almost violet in the shade.

Water-Lilies, Setting Sun stayed with the painter until 1923, when he may have touched it once more. Standing before it now at the National Gallery in London, one senses an old man refusing to finish, refusing to let go of a pond that had, by then, become the entire visible world. Perhaps that is why the picture feels less like a view than a long, held breath.