"I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them."
Claude Monet (1840-1926) is the founder of Impressionism and one of the most transformative figures in the history of art. Working directly before nature in the plein-air tradition, he pursued a lifelong obsession with light, atmosphere, and the passage of time - developing the serial approach to painting that produced his celebrated sequences of haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and, above all, the Nymphéas. His 1874 painting Impression, soleil levant gave the Impressionist movement its name. He spent the final decades of his life at Giverny, where the water garden he created became the subject of his greatest work. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the world's foremost museums.