Claude Monet

Monet gave Impressionism its name by accident, with a painting called Impression, Sunrise that a hostile critic used as a stick to beat the whole group in 1874. He spent the next fifty years pursuing one idea with more discipline than anyone else of his generation: that a painting records a specific light at a specific moment, and that the way to prove it is to paint the same subject repeatedly under different conditions. Hence the series — the stacks of wheat, the poplars, Rouen cathedral, the Thames, and finally the water lilies, which occupied him for the last twenty-five years of his life. The Giverny garden where those were painted was not found but built: he diverted a stream, planted the willows and bamboo, imported the lilies, and then painted the result, which makes the late work a strange hybrid of landscape and self-portrait. He outlived almost all the other Impressionists, developed cataracts that measurably shifted the colour of his late canvases, and had them operated on in his eighties.