Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a French painter and a founder of Impressionism, its most consistent practitioner in painting nature as he perceived it, above all in outdoor landscapes. Raised in Le Havre, he was introduced to plein air painting by Eugène Boudin and studied under Charles Gleyre alongside Auguste Renoir. The movement's name comes from his Impression, Sunrise, shown in 1874 at the First Impressionist Exhibition, which he and like-minded artists organised as an alternative to the Salon. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he made a water-lily pond, and he painted the same scenes many times to catch the changing light: haystacks, Rouen Cathedral and the water lilies of his last 20 years.