Claude Monet Paintings

Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 – 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.

Claude 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.

By the early 1880s, Monet and his artist friends, including Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, Sisley and Edgar Degas, had become disillusioned with the restrictive standards of the dominant arts organization in Paris, L’Academie des Beaus-Arts, which selected the paintings to be included in the yearly Salons. In 1873, they joined other like-minded colleagues to form their own arts organization, “Societe Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs,” or the Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. The group organized its first exhibit, which included the work of 30 artists, in the spring of 1874.

Claude Monet opted to show his 1872 painting, Impression Sunrise, which proved to be a fateful decision. One of the art critics reviewing the exhibit coined the term “Impressionism” as a derisive jest after viewing “Impression Sunrise” and similarly rendered works on display, claiming that the paintings were amateurish and unfinished. The artists embraced the new title for their movement, and thereafter, identified themselves as Impressionists.

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.

Presenting a gallery of almost complete artworks of Claude Monet.