Claude Monet gave Impressionism its name — and then spent the rest of his long life proving what the word truly meant. His 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise, a hazy view of the harbor at Le Havre rendered in quick, broken brushstrokes, was ridiculed by critics who used the title as a term of derision. But Monet and his circle — Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and others — embraced the label and launched a revolution. They abandoned the dark studios and classical subjects of academic painting, setting up their easels outdoors to capture the fleeting effects of sunlight on water, snow, cathedrals, and haystacks. Monet was the most dedicated of them all, returning to the same subject again and again at different hours and seasons to record how light transformed the world from moment to moment.
This obsession with serial repetition produced some of the most celebrated bodies of work in modern art. His series of Rouen Cathedral facades, painted in the 1890s, showed the same Gothic stonework dissolving and re-forming under morning mist, blazing noon sun, and dusky twilight — each canvas a different symphony of color. His haystacks and poplar series pursued the same idea with equal rigor. But it was at Giverny, the rural property where he designed elaborate water gardens, that Monet found his ultimate subject. The Water Lilies — roughly two hundred and fifty paintings created over the last three decades of his life — progressively dissolved form into shimmering fields of color and reflection, anticipating the abstraction that would dominate the century after his death.
Monet continued painting even as cataracts clouded his vision, producing late canvases of extraordinary boldness. He died at Giverny in 1926, having lived long enough to see Impressionism pass from scandal to mainstream acceptance. His influence on modern art is immeasurable: he taught painters to trust the evidence of their eyes over the conventions of the academy, and he demonstrated that light itself — shifting, elusive, endlessly beautiful — could be the true subject of a painting.