Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872. Oil on canvas, 48 × 63 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Impressionism
Impression, Sunrise
Claude Monet · 1872
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 48 × 63 cm
- Held by
- Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
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.
Nearby
Related works
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Art Institute of Chicago
Water Lilies
Art Institute of Chicago
What to look at
This is the painting that named a movement, and it did so as an insult. Monet showed it at the first independent exhibition in 1874; a critic took the title and used it to mock the whole group as mere "impressionists". The subject is the outer harbour at Le Havre in morning mist, with cranes and masts of the industrial port dissolved into the background. The famous feature is a colour trick: the orange sun is almost exactly the same luminance as the blue-grey sky around it. Because our eyes resolve brightness far more sharply than colour, the sun appears to pulse and shift — it will not sit still, and it goes nearly invisible in a black-and-white reproduction. The whole painting is about fifteen distinct brushstrokes' worth of information; the three small boats are each two or three marks.