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Claude Monet's Nympheas bleus (Blue Water Lilies) was painted from 1916 to 1919.

"Nymphaea" is the botanical name for a water lily. Monet grew white water lilies in the water garden he had installed in his property at Giverny in 1893. From the 1910s until he died in 1926, the garden and its pond in particular, became the artist's sole source of inspiration. He said: "I have come back to things that are impossible to do: water with weeds waving in the depths. Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing. My greatest masterpiece is my garden."

Eliminating the horizon and the sky, Monet focused on a small area of the pond, seen as a piece of nature, almost a close-up. No details stand out and the overall impression is one of a shapeless surface. The square format reinforces the neutrality of the composition. The lack of a frame of reference gives the fragment an infinite, limitless feeling.
Never was the artist's brushstroke so free, so detached from the description of forms. A close-up view of the canvas gives a feeling of total abstraction, because the brushstrokes are stronger than the identification of the plants or their reflections. The viewer has to make a constant visual and mental effort to piece together the landscape suggested in the painting. The unfinished borders accentuate this insistence on painting as a surface covered with paint, which was not lost on artists after the Second World War, particularly American painters exploring "abstract landscapes" and "lyrical abstraction."

The Musee d'Orsay (The Orsay Museum), housed in the former railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography, and is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist masterpieces by popular painters such as Monet and Renoir. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986.

Georges Seurat's Le Cirque (The Circus) was painted between 1890-1891. Although the painting was incomplete, he exhibited it at the Salon des Independants. In the process, he grew ill from exhaustion and died before the exhibit ended, leaving his final work unfinished.

The circus theme was often covered in the 1880's, especially by Renoir, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. However, Le Cirque, far from a merely anecdotal rendering of a modern form of entertainment, constitutes one of the most impressive applications of Divisionist theory. Seurat interprets Charles Henry's theories on the psychological effects of line and colour as well those on the optical mixing of colours formulated by Chevreul and Hood. When the painting was exhibited at the Salon des Independants, a critic observed that "everything in The Circus achieves harmony through analogy, through the conciliation of opposites, conspiring towards a sense of gaiety: ascending lines, successive tone contrasts, pronounced dominance of orange, highlighted by a frame which creates an opposition of tone and colour with the whole..." With this work, Seurat was seeking to create a symbiosis between artistic creation and scientific analysis, a subject of great popular interest in the 19th century.

The Musee d'Orsay (The Orsay Museum), housed in the former railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography, and is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist masterpieces by popular painters such as Monet and Renoir. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986.