Claude Monet

Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre, where Eugène Boudin took him painting outdoors. Impression, Sunrise (1872), shown in Paris in 1874, gave a critic the word for the whole group. Monet worked in front of the motif in broken strokes of unmixed colour, more interested in the air between him and the subject than in the subject itself.

From the 1890s he painted in series, setting up several canvases and moving between them as the light changed: the Haystacks (1890–91), the poplars, the façade of Rouen Cathedral (1892–94). At Giverny, where he settled in 1883, he made a water garden and painted its lilies for nearly thirty years, ending with the long panels installed in the Orangerie in Paris in 1927, the year after his death.