Claude Monet

French · 1840–1926

Claude Monet was a French painter and the founder of Impressionism, a movement named after his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872). He worked outdoors to capture shifting light and atmosphere, painting the same subjects repeatedly across changing conditions in series such as Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral and Poplars on the Epte. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where the water garden he built became the subject of the monumental Water Lilies cycle that occupied the last three decades of his life.