Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (/moʊˈneɪ/; French: [klod mɔnɛ]; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to
adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture
the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet
lived in Giverny,
where he purchased a house and property, and began a vast landscaping
project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his
best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in
vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in
the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously
for the next 20 years of his life.From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection from the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts which held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris. During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley organized the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers) to exhibit their artworks independently. At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that was to give the group its lasting name.
Impression, Sunrise was painted in 1872, depicting a Le Havre port landscape. From the painting's title the art critic Louis Leroy, in his review, "L'Exposition des Impressionnistes," which appeared in Le Charivari, coined the term "Impressionism". It was intended as disparagement but the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves.
Source: Wikipedia
