Claude Monet

In April 1874 a group of painters, tired of being turned away by the official Salon, hung their own show in a photographer's old studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Monet sent a loose harbour scene of his home town, Le Havre, at dawn, and called it Impression, Sunrise. A critic seized on that one word to mock the whole room, and the insult stuck as a label: Impressionism. Monet was 33, and he would spend the next 50 years making the joke look like a prophecy.

The pull was always the same thing, light on a surface as it actually changed, minute to minute. He painted the same haystack, the same cathedral front, again and again at different hours, chasing the moment before it moved. In 1883 he rented a house at Giverny, a village north-west of Paris, and over years turned its grounds into the motif he never had to leave, a pond fed by a diverted arm of a small river, a Japanese bridge, and water lilies. He had to petition local officials for the water rights, and some neighbours worried his strange plants would poison the stream. For the last two decades of his life that pond was almost his only subject, and he made around 250 paintings of it.

Those final years were hard. His second wife Alice died in 1911, his eldest son Jean in 1914, and his own eyes were clouding with cataracts that dragged his colours toward muddy red and brown. He kept painting the lilies anyway, the canvases growing wilder as he saw less. After an operation partly restored his sight he looked at some of what he had made half-blind and burned it. The huge water-lily panels he gave to the French state still hang in two oval rooms of the Orangerie in Paris, set low and curved so a viewer stands inside the pond he could barely see.