The Artist

Claude Monet

French · 1840 - 1926 · Impressionism

Claude Monet didn't just paint Impressionism — he named it, with a single canvas (Impression, Sunrise) that gave the movement its label and its method. For sixty years he chased light: haystacks at every hour, Rouen Cathedral through every season, the Japanese bridge over his Giverny water lily pond painted from dozens of angles. Monet's late work — vast water lily canvases, increasingly abstract — pointed toward modern painting without leaving the garden. His paintings read as wall art the way they read at the Musée d'Orangerie: as washes of color, mood, and weather you can live inside.