Discovery of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies: Reflection of Willows’ in the Matsukata Collection

On February 26, the National Museum of Western Art announced that one of Claude Monet’s series of paintings, ‘Water lilies: Reflection of Willows’, collected by businessman MATSUKATA Kōjirō was found in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The work, purchased by Matsukata directly from Monet in 1921, which had been removed from its wooden frame and rolled into a cylinder, was discovered in September 2016 in a storage room in the Louvre. The work was subsequently returned by the French government to the Matsukata family, who donated it to the National Museum of Western Art in November 2017. The museum carried out restoration work on the painting and unveiled it in its special exhibition entitled, ‘The Matsukata Collection: A One-Hundred-Year Odyssey’, from June 11 to September 23, 2019. (Japanese)