In 1874, a group of French painters whose work had been rejected by the academic Salon organized their own exhibition. Their canvases were jeered and laughed at not only by the public but also by the critics. Among the independents were Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Cezanne. As it happened, one of Monet’s pictures was titled Sunrise, an Impression, and one of the critics gave himself a good time by contemptuously labeling all the exhibitors “Impressionists.”Claude Monet, the son of a grocer of Le Havre, is considered the founder of impressionism. Such phenomena as light and atmosphere were nothing new to painters; Monet and his fellow impressionists simply carried their investigations further. They saw matter as disintegrated light and endeavored to transcribe nature in terms of the spectrum. They found their subject matter in everyday life and liked to paint in pure and brilliant colors.
As a student in Paris visiting the Louvre, Monet had seen painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he had instead sat by a window and painted what he saw. He remained the most consistent practitioner of Impressionism’s philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, and produced hundreds of paintings before his death on December 5, 1926 of lung cancer.
