Claude Monet

Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast and spent his life painting light as it changes, out of doors wherever he could. In 1874 he and a group of friends showed their work outside the official Salon, and the movement took its name from one of his paintings there, Impression, Sunrise.

For the last twenty years of his life he painted the water lilies in the pond he had dug at his house in Giverny, even as cataracts clouded his sight. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has one of his great late Water Lilies, a canvas so wide you have to step back across the room to take it in. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which is free, shows his earlier work in the West Building.