Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was born in Paris and raised in Le Havre, where Eugène Boudin introduced him to painting out of doors. He studied at the Académie Suisse and under Charles Gleyre, where Renoir was a fellow student, and counted the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind as a second mentor. He spent the Franco-Prussian War in London and the Netherlands, worked at Argenteuil and Vétheuil, and from 1883 lived at Giverny. Impressionism takes its name from his Impression, Sunrise, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where a hostile critic coined the term. Monet remained the movement's most consistent practitioner, and his habit of returning to one motif under changing light produced the series of haystacks, the views of Rouen Cathedral and, for the last twenty years of his life, the water lilies of his own garden pond at Giverny. Cataracts clouded his late vision, and the large late canvases were long neglected before being rediscovered in the 1950s. Seven works here, including Poppy Field, Water Lilies and Rouen Cathedral.