Claude Monet
Founder of Impressionism · 250+ paintings in the Water Lilies series
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Claude Monet did not merely paint landscapes — he painted time itself. In an era when cameras were beginning to capture the world with mechanical precision, Monet argued that what the eye truly sees is not solid objects but the ever-shifting play of light across surfaces. That conviction became a revolution, and the revolution became Impressionism, one of the most influential movements in the history of Western art.
Born in Paris on November 14, 1840, and raised in Normandy, Monet showed an early gift for caricature that earned him pocket money as a teenager. His pivotal encounter came when the older painter Eugène Boudin introduced him to plein air painting — working outdoors directly in front of the subject rather than from memory in a studio. That lesson never left him. Monet would spend the rest of his life chasing the light as it actually appeared, not as convention dictated it should look.
In 1872 he completed Impression, Sunrise — a loose, gestural rendering of Le Havre harbour at dawn. A hostile critic borrowed the word "impression" to mock the painting, and Monet embraced the label. The Impressionist movement was born from that single barb. He and his circle — Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, Cézanne — began organizing independent exhibitions outside the official Salon, fundamentally changing who controlled the art world.
Monet's most distinctive contribution was the concept of painting the same subject repeatedly under different light conditions. His Haystacks series (1890–91) showed the same farm stacks in summer sun, autumn mist, winter snow, and evening gold. The Rouen Cathedral series (1892–94) did the same with ancient stone. Critics who had dismissed him for years began to understand: he was not painting cathedrals or haystacks — he was painting perception itself, the way light and atmosphere continuously transform what we see.
Financial struggle and family grief shadowed his middle years. His first wife Camille died in 1879 after years of illness. He watched her as she lay dying and later confessed, with horror, that he had automatically analysed the colours draining from her face. "I found myself staring at her tragic temples," he wrote, "and mechanically analysing the succession of colour gradations death was imposing on her motionless face." Painting had become so embedded in his consciousness it overrode even grief.
"The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration." — Claude Monet
In 1883 Monet settled at Giverny in Normandy, eventually purchasing the property and designing an elaborate water garden complete with a Japanese bridge, weeping willows, and above all a pond planted with water lilies. This garden became his final subject — a world he had constructed himself so he could paint it obsessively. The resulting Water Lilies series eventually comprised over 250 canvases, culminating in the monumental panels installed in the Orangerie in Paris, which he donated to France as a memorial to the soldiers of World War One. Those eight curved canvases, each several metres wide, envelop the viewer in a 360-degree panorama of water and light — an immersive experience that prefigures the abstract expressionism of the next century.
From around 1908 Monet's eyesight began to fail due to cataracts. He refused surgery for years, dreading the altered colour perception it might cause. His late canvases grew more turbulent and abstract, colours distorted by his failing vision — and those paintings are now considered among his greatest. He finally submitted to surgery in 1923 and spent his final years still working, still chasing light, until his death in December 1926 at the age of 86.
Born in Paris; family moves to Normandy where he discovers painting outdoors.
Studies in Paris; meets Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille — future Impressionist colleagues.
Paints Impression, Sunrise; the name "Impressionism" coined in mockery, then adopted proudly.
Settles at Giverny; designs the water garden that will define his final 40 years.
Begins systematic series paintings — Haystacks, then Poplars, then Rouen Cathedral.
Dies at Giverny; the Orangerie Water Lilies panels open to the public the following year.
Monet taught the world to look differently. Before Impressionism, painting aimed to record the world as a stable, knowable object. Monet insisted that seeing is always provisional — light changes, eyes change, moments pass. That idea became the foundation of modern art. Abstract expressionists, colour field painters, and contemporary installation artists all trace a line back to those shimmering lily ponds. His most famous canvases now draw millions of visitors to the Orangerie every year, yet they feel as immediate as the morning they were painted.