Woman in the Garden

Monet grew up in Le Havre selling caricatures of local worthies for pocket money. Eugène Boudin talked him into painting outdoors, which at the time was an awkward, slightly eccentric thing to do, and he never really came back inside. One canvas gave the movement its name. Impression, Sunrise was hung in the 1874 independent exhibition and a critic used the title as an insult. It stuck, and the painters adopted it. The serial work came later and is the part that still looks radical. Haystacks, poplars, the façade of Rouen cathedral, the Thames under fog, all painted over and over at different hours. The subject was never the point. The light falling on it was. He bought the house at Giverny in 1890, built the water garden, and spent his last three decades painting it. Cataracts wrecked his colour judgement in the 1910s and the late water lilies were made half blind, then partly repainted after surgery. He died there in 1926.