Claude Monet (Paris, November 14, 1840-Giverny, December 5, 1926) was a French painter, one of the creators of Impressionism. The term impressionism derives from the title of his work Impression, rising sun (1872).

His first works, until the mid-1860s, are in a realistic style. Monet managed to exhibit some at the Paris Salon. From the end of the 1860s he began to paint impressionist works . This deviation from the taste of the time, which was marked by the art academies, worsened his economic situation while strengthening his decision to continue on that risky path.

In the 1870s he was part of the Impressionist exhibitions in which Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas also participated. His work Impression, rising sun was part of the Salon des Refusés of 1874. His career was promoted by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, but despite this his financial situation remained difficult until the mid-1890s. At this time, Monet developed the concept of "series", in which a motif is painted repeatedly under different lighting . At the same time he began working on the famous garden of his house in Giverny with lily ponds which he later used as a motif for his paintings.

No painter of the group was as purely impressionist as Monet. In his work the dominant factor is a clear effort to incorporate the new mode of vision, especially the character of light, while the composition of large masses and surfaces serves only to establish a certain coherence. For his part, Renoir was the painter who convinced us that the aesthetics of Impressionism were, above all, hedonistic. Pleasure seems to be the most evident quality of his work, the immediate and burning pleasure that painting produces in him. He never let himself be overwhelmed by problems of style and went so far as to say that the purpose of a painting is simply to decorate a wall and that that is why it was important that the colors be pleasant in themselves.

Of all the Impressionists, Monet was the one who most emphatically practiced plenairism, that is, the practice of plein-air painting (in French: 'full, total air' and also - and that is the meaning that matters most to us here). — plein air), painting in the open air. Although there are a large number of landscape painters prior to Monet, it is noticeable in them that the execution of their works has been carried out mainly within the workshop after a prior sketch. Until the second half of s. XIX, the paintings (oil, tempera) were made by hand and packaged in jars, knobs, etc. The invention of paint jars and tubes (a positive product of the Industrial Revolution) allowed painters to take their oil or tempera paints outdoors, under the sun, without these elements drying or oxidizing quickly as had happened until then. .