This may be the most expensive bead I've ever bought, but it would have been a bargain at twice the price.  My mom adores the paintings of the impressionist artist Claude Monet.  When I attended the Gathering, the annual conference of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers, the wonderfully talented Lisa St. Martin was showing her beads that are dead-on copies - in GLASS - of various impressionist paintings, mostly Monet and Van Gogh.  She "paints" onto a base bead melting dots from fine threads of glass that she mixes herself to obtain the necessary range of colors.  I bought this one, a rendering of one of Monet's series of 23 paintings of the Poplars on the Banks of the Epte, painted in 1890-91.  The bead itself is huge, and so special that I strung it simply with ocean blue chalcedony and 14K YGF beads and findings.  Mom loved it.  It's an extraordinary bead.