Claude Monet

The founding figure of French Impressionism, and the artist most responsible for establishing the movement's core method: painting outdoors, in series, to track how a single subject changes under different light and weather. The movement takes its name from one of his canvases — Impression, Sunrise, shown in the first independent Impressionist exhibition in 1874 — which a hostile critic borrowed to mock the entire show as a collection of mere 'impressions.' Monet spent the rest of his long career proving the insult right. He settled permanently at Giverny in 1883, where he designed the water garden — the Japanese bridge, the lily pond, the weeping willows — that would become the obsessive subject of his final thirty years. He worked in series: haystacks at different hours, Rouen Cathedral in different weathers, the Thames at different atmospheric moments. The series method was a deliberate argument: that a motif's identity was inseparable from its light, that there was no such thing as a fixed appearance. Cataracts began affecting his vision severely after 1912, and the late Water Lilies — the vast decorative panels now at the Orangerie in Paris — were painted by a man who could barely distinguish between colors. Monet lived until 1926, outlasting his entire generation and most of the next, and witnessing Fauvism and early abstraction emerge partly from the logic of his own work. The Water Lilies he donated to the French state in 1926 now fill two oval rooms in a purpose-built space; they are among the most visited works of art in the world.