Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the founder of the French Impressionist movement, and one of the movement's most consistently unwavering practitioners. He is best known for his series of oil paintings, which depicted the same scene— usually the French countryside— multiple times from different perspectives in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. In 1899, he began painting the water lilies on his estate; first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in a famous series of large-scale paintings that would occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.