Claude Monet was the founder and most consistent practitioner of Impressionism, a movement whose name derives from his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise. Born in Paris and raised in Normandy, Monet spent his life pursuing the fleeting effects of light on water, sky, and landscape. He worked in series — haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, poplars, and his beloved water lilies — returning to the same subject at different times of day and in different weather to capture the transience of perception. He purchased a property at Giverny in 1883, where he designed the famous water garden that became the subject of his final monumental series of large-scale Water Lilies panels, painted while nearly blind with cataracts. These works anticipate Abstract Expressionism by four decades.
