Old master's back home in Paris

In the last 30 years of his life Claude Monet painted his beloved garden at Giverny hundreds of times, preserving 250 canvases but destroying many others. For the first time, the French curator Pierre Georgel has brought together 60 - nearly a quarter of the total - of Monet's Nympheas (water-lilies) series. Eighteen of the paintings have been loaned by US museums. Four came from Britain and others from Sweden, Germany and Japan. The exhibition, which continues until August 2nd, is widely praised as one of the finest in France this year.

Because the Orangerie will then be closed for renovations, it also provides the last opportunity before 2003 to view the giant panels that Monet donated to the French state.

Monet lavished the genius of his old age on the Nympheas and Nenuphars (lotuses). "These waterscapes have become an obsession," he wrote in 1908. "It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to manage to render what I feel. I destroy some . . . I start over . . . and I hope that from so much effort something will result."

In the "Water-lily Ponds" of 1899 and 1900, Monet painted and repainted the arched Japanese bridge in his garden in every light at every time of day. These canvases abound with an intense, natural energy. "You feel the underground life at the bottom of the pools," the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren wrote, "the dense growth of the roots, the tangle of stems underlying the mass of bouquets on the surface . . ."

By 1903, Monet narrowed his focus to the water itself, abandoning the bridge, willow trees and the foliage on the banks. In these "waterscapes", lilies float amid mirrored clouds, sky, sunlight and trees. The subject matter is impalpable, unreal as a reflection, yet rendered with almost photographic precision. Throughout his life, Monet reacted angrily to those who said his paintings were fanciful. He was, he protested, a realist.

Misfortune struck the ageing painter in 1910. Floods destroyed his garden at Giverny, which he redesigned and rebuilt. The following year, his wife died. Then, in 1912, he noticed "with terror" that he could no longer see through his right eye and learned that he suffered from a double cataract. He none the less began six years of large studies for the water-lily panels he would donate to the Orangerie. The precision of the "waterscapes" disappeared. As his vision worsened, Monet's style became more blurred, sometimes approaching the abstract.

HIS work was interrupted by depression over his failing eyesight and the slaughter of the first World War. Although he closed himself off from the world, he could not ignore the munitions trains that thundered past the bottom of his garden at Giverny.

In 1917, a government minister took Monet to Reims, to see the cathedral after German shells set fire to it. The Paris authorities hoped the old man would record this act of vandalism on canvas; but Monet took one look at the smoking ruins and returned to his water-lilies.

He none the less wanted to participate in the war victory, and on November 12th, 1918 he wrote to his great friend, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, offering to France two giant water-lily panels to be chosen by Clemenceau and installed in a specially designed museum. It was to commemorate the 80th anniversary of this donation that the present exhibition was organised. In the eight years between Monet's offer and his death, he pleaded for more time to complete his ethereal masterpieces, quarrelled with the architects responsible for placing the canvases, and ultimately could not bring himself to part with them while he was alive.

Immediately after his death in December 1926, Monet's son gave the 22 panels to the Orangerie, where they were permanently glued onto elliptical walls.

Today, Monet is France's most popular painter and the Orangerie is, in the words of the painter Andre Masson, "the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism". But in the decades following his death the painter was regarded as a slightly cracked old man who painted too many ponds.

In 1935, his great panels were hidden by Flemish tapestries. They were damaged in second World War bombardments and were not fully restored until 1978.

In another sense, too, this exhibition marks the revenge of history. A few days before it opened, the French Minister of Culture handed over one of the water-lily paintings to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg, a French Jewish art dealer who fled the Nazis in 1940 and settled in New York. Rosenberg, who died in 1959, had hidden 160 paintings in his villa near Bordeaux and in a bank vault. Two French antique dealers denounced him to the Germans.

Rosenberg's Monet ended up in the home of Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. It was returned to the Louvre after the war, but was not identified by the family until 1998. Upon receiving the water-lily painting, Micheline and Elaine Rosenberg immediately loaned it to the Orangerie until August 2nd.