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Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840 - 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting,
and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature,
especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting
Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874in the first of the independent exhibitions
mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times
in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased
a house and property, and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his
best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical viewswith a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and
later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.
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