The Painter

Claude Monet

1840–1926 · French · Impressionism

The founder of Impressionism, and the painter who spent thirty years on one pond.

Claude Monet gave Impressionism its name — by accident. When he showed Impression, Sunrise at the independent exhibition of 1874, a critic used the title to mock the whole group for exhibiting sketches. Monet kept the insult and spent the next fifty years proving it was a method.

That method was to paint light rather than things. He worked outdoors, fast, in series: the same haystack, the same cathedral façade, the same water at different hours, because what changed between canvases was the only subject he cared about. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he built the water garden that occupied the last thirty years of his life.

He was still working on the Water Lilies in 1926, the year he died, painting through cataracts that shifted his whole palette towards red and amber. The late panels abandon the horizon line entirely.

Reproducing this painter

Impressionist paint is laid in short, separate strokes that the eye mixes rather than the palette, and most of it goes on wet-in-wet in a single session. Reproducing it means committing to the stroke: rework a passage and the colour muddies, and the light dies with it.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.