In 1840, the French painter Claude Monet was born.
Monet is the most Impressionist of impressionists, and his work is the symbol of the movement. It is appropriate that one of his pictures exhibited in 1874 was called Impression Sunrise should have led a Parisian columnist of baptise the new movement.
The title of this piece alone revealed the artists will to transcribe his own feeling rather than to represent a particular landscape.
At this time modern art broke with that of preceding centuries. A landscape is not the same at dawn, at twilight, in autumn or in spring. He wanted to paint the sun, the cold, the wind and the mist. These ideas were new and came as a revelation.
Monet confined himself almost exclusively to landscapes and mostly to those in which water adds an element of movement. His garlands of wistarias, reflected in the shifting mirror of the lake, his sheets of water lilies floating on the changing water, provided him with a whole dazzling play of coloured mirages that were their own justification.
He demonstrated that no absolute colour exists in nature, only light, and that since the appearance of all objects changes perpetually, the art of the painter should consist in choosing one moment in preference to any other, in order to fix its individuality in a definitive image.
Monets art in fact remains closer to nature, the explanation is that the painters eye has succeeded in catching what previously seemed impossible to seize.
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