Claude Monet

Claude Monet was the French painter who did more than anyone to launch Impressionism, the movement that turned loose brushwork and shifting light into serious art. Born in Paris in 1840 and raised in the port town of Le Havre, he was fascinated from the start by how sunlight changes the look of a thing from one minute to the next. His 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise even gave the movement its name, though critics first used the word as an insult.

Rather than paint a subject once, Monet often returned to it again and again at different times of day, from haystacks to the front of Rouen Cathedral to the water lilies in his garden at Giverny. That garden, which he designed himself, became his great late life obsession, and he kept painting its pond even as his eyesight failed from cataracts. His work sits at the heart of almost every collection of nineteenth century art, and its popularity has never really faded.