"For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value."
Claude Monet (1840-1926) is the founding figure of Impressionism and one of the most consequential artists in the history of Western painting. Born in Paris and raised in Normandy, he developed an instinct for the natural world from childhood, spending his early years on the Channel coast where the ever-changing light, weather, and water would become the defining subjects of his life's work. It was on those beaches that he encountered Eugène Boudin, the landscape painter who introduced him to plein-air painting - the practice of working directly before nature - and set him irrevocably on his path.
Moving to Paris in his early twenties, Monet studied alongside Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, and quickly emerged as the most radical and committed voice among them. In 1874, he and his associates mounted an independent exhibition in deliberate opposition to the conservative Paris Salon. His contribution, Impression, soleil levant - a loosely rendered study of Le Havre at dawn - drew immediate ridicule from critics who seized on its title to mock the whole group as "Impressionists." The artists adopted the name with pride. The movement it identified would go on to transform not only French painting but the entire trajectory of modern art.
At the core of Monet's practice was an obsession with light - its quality, its transience, and its power to dissolve the apparent solidity of the physical world into sensation. He pioneered the serial approach to painting, returning to the same subject - haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the Thames, the poplars at Giverny - at different times of day and across the changing seasons, producing sequences of canvases that together chart the passage of time and atmosphere with extraordinary sensitivity. No painter before him had pursued this idea with such systematic rigour or such lyrical intensity.
From 1883, Monet lived at Giverny in Normandy, where he created the famous water garden that would occupy the final three decades of his career. The Nymphéas - the vast series of Water Lily paintings culminating in the monumental canvases installed at the Orangerie in Paris - represent the summit of his achievement and a bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and the gestural abstraction of the twentieth century. Painted largely as his eyesight failed, they stand as one of the most remarkable acts of artistic will in recorded history.
Monet died at Giverny in December 1926. His works are held in virtually every major museum in the world, including the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery, London; and the Art Institute of Chicago.