Artist: Claude Monet
Claude Monet (November 14, 1840- December 5, 1926), was a French Impressionist painter and oft called the Father of Impressionism. It was Claude Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise,' which provoked Parisian art critic Louis Leroy to describe it is more like an impression than a painting, and coin the term 'Impressionism.' Though Leroy meant it in a derogatory manner, Monet and like-minded artists ran with the term and dubbed themselves 'the Impressionists.'
In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or as his interest shifted. These series were frequently exhibited in groups—for example, his images of haystacks (1890/91) and the Rouen cathedral (1894). At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series of paintings. This overall series occupied Monet until his death 30 years later and includes dozens of canvases creating a panorama of water, lilies, and sky in his studio inspired by his Giverny garden. The most famous of this series are the eight large panels of Water Lillies that are installed in two eliptical rooms of the L'Orangerie museum in Paris.
Monet describes his goals for the project: "Imagine a circular room, whose walls are entirely filled by a horizon of water spotted with these plants. Walls of transparency - sometimes green, sometimes verging on mauve. The silence and calm of the water reflecting the flowering display; the tones are vague, deliciously nuanced, as delicate as a dream."
The ultimate installation is considered to be one of the great achievement of Monet, Impressionism, and even 20th-century art. The lighting and setup in the museum maximizes the viewers experience next to these works, providing, as Monet said, an "illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore". These works would be enormously influencial for many artists, but the all over composition would particularly inspire the Abstract Expressionist large-scale canvases of The New York School.
