The French painter (1840–1926) who became the central figure of Impressionism, made working outdoors in changing light central to his art, while still building his canvases with deliberation, and spent his life trying to record not objects but the fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere. His painting Impression, Sunrise gave the movement its name, taken from a hostile critic's mockery. Through his series of haystacks, poplars, and Rouen Cathedral, and the vast Water Lilies of his garden at Giverny, he is widely seen as one of the painters who broke the long grip of realistic representation and helped open the door to modern art.
An aging painter stood in a Normandy field at first light, and again at noon, and again as the sun sank, working not on one canvas of a haystack but on a dozen at once, switching between them as the light shifted. He was not painting the haystack. He was painting the light on it, which was never the same twice. This was Claude Monet's obsession for half a century: to record the exact colour of a passing moment before it vanished. He chased it across cathedral fronts, poplars, the river Seine, and finally his own lily pond. In doing so he helped teach the modern world that a painting need not copy what is there. It can record how one eye saw it, once.