Paintings

Nineteen paintings by Claude Monet — from the birth of Impressionism to the monumental Water Lilies that anticipated Abstract Expressionism. Monet painted light itself: the way it shattered on water, filtered through fog, blazed across haystacks, dissolved the stone façade of Rouen Cathedral. His 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise gave the movement its name — meant as an insult by a hostile critic, claimed as a badge of honor by the artists themselves. The late Water Lilies, painted in his garden at Giverny as his eyesight failed, are among the most ambitious works in the history of painting: vast canvases where pond, sky, and reflection merge into fields of pure color that hover on the edge of abstraction. Monet painted the same subjects again and again — haystacks, poplars, the Japanese bridge — because he understood that no scene is ever the same twice.