Chromatlas

Person

Claude Monet

He painted the same haystack, cathedral and pond again and again to catch color changing with the light.

Lived
1840–1926
Series
Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Parliament, Water Lilies
Cataract surgery
1923

Claude Monet (1840–1926) gave Impressionism its name: a critic mocked his harbor view Impression, Sunrise at the group's first show in 1874. Taught to paint outdoors by Eugène Boudin, Monet wanted to paint not things but the light on them, like the sunlit white dress and green-shadowed parasol of Woman with a Parasol (1875).

From 1890 he worked in series. He painted haystacks at different hours and seasons, then dozens of views of Rouen Cathedral's facade as the light moved, switching canvases through the day. In London he painted the Houses of Parliament at sunset and in fog. The subject stays put; the color is the story (see color constancy). One of his haystacks later set Kandinsky on the road to abstraction.

His last great subject was his garden at Giverny, with its lily pond and Japanese footbridge. From 1899 until his death he made more than 250 paintings of water lilies. Like the other Impressionists he mostly avoided black, built darks from colors, and loved violet shadows and warm-cool contrasts.

Then his eyes failed. Cataracts dimmed his sight from around 1912, and his paintings grew broader and leaned toward reds and yellows. After surgery in 1923 he saw things strongly bluish for a time, destroyed some canvases from his years of poor sight, and retouched others with bluer water lilies: a rare record of a painter's eyes changing his color.

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