As the sun rose over Giverny, France, a gardener paddled a small boat out into Claude Monet’s backyard pond. Then, he began gently submerging lily pads into the water one by one, washing away any dust that had accumulated overnight.
Monet watched from the bank, his palette in hand. He was ready to begin the day’s work, but first, as always, he insisted that the lilies be properly dusted.Monet was captivated by his pond: the distorted reflections on the surface, the swirling weeds below, the way the light played on it all. He hadn’t always paid it so much attention. At first, he said, “I grew [water lilies] without thinking of painting them … then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.”
Now in his mid-70s, the renowned painter had already been attempting to capture the scene for more than a decade when he struck upon an idea in 1914: giant, wall-sized paintings that would fill an entire room, giving “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore.” But making his vision a reality would be a race against time. The artist was going blind.
From a young age, Oscar-Claude Monet enjoyed prodding authority with art. In school, he doodled caricatures of his teachers. By the time he was 15, he was charging commercial rates for cartoons lampooning local bankers and politicians. He received little encouragement from his parents—he was supposed to join the family grocery business.
So to get feedback, he’d linger outside a local shop that displayed his drawings in the front window, eavesdropping on what customers had to say.In 1861, the young man made a seven-year commitment to join the military, but shortly into his second year, he contracted typhoid. His aunt agreed to pay his way out of the army, with a catch: He had to attend art school. Monet enrolled in art classes and quickly came to resent the French art establishment, the Académie.
The Académie was uncompromisingly stodgy. Paintings were supposed to look as smooth as exquisitely polished Roman statues. Scenes had to show classical myths and histories. In short, paintings had to follow a formula.
Monet found the whole system antiquated. “I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule,” he wrote. Why should he copy the Old Masters at the Louvre when modern life was happening outside? He rebelled, ditching art school for painting sessions in the country.
But he was torn between his renegade impulses and his desire for approval. The Académie was France’s artistic gatekeeper, and without its blessing, he’d struggle to make a living as an artist. He regularly submitted works to the Salon de Paris, the Académie’s annual art exhibition, but they were rarely accepted. By 1868, he was penniless and depressed, with a girlfriend and a young child to support. He asked his father for money but was rejected. At his wit’s end, he jumped off a bridge spanning the river Seine.
Monet came to his senses the moment he hit the water, and he hauled himself to shore. Soon, he found company in the misery of other artists chafing under the Académie: Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas. Their styles were similar—bright colors and fudged details—but ire for the Académie truly brought them together. Every afternoon, they gathered at the Café Guerbois. Manet charmed with his manners, Degas offended with his waspish tongue, Pissarro tried to convert them all to socialism, and Cézanne glowered in the corner, his pants held up with a piece of old string. Monet hit them up for loans.
They talked about organizing something that would compete with the Académie’s snooty salon. After endless discussions, in the spring of 1874, the group—dubbing itself The Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.—opened a monthlong exhibition. Thirty artists showcased 165 works of new art, many of which had been rejected by the Salon de Paris.
Parisians who attended the show soon realized why. The canvases looked unfinished. The colors were all wrong. The models were ugly. Critic Jules Claretie moaned that the artists had “declared war on beauty.” People marched to the door and demanded their money back. One critic cleaned his glasses, certain he wasn’t seeing the art clearly.
The press gleefully ridiculed the work by fixating on a title Monet carelessly gave one seascape—“Impression: Sunrise.” Critic Louis Leroy mocked them by calling them impressionists, and the name stuck. Shortly after, the artists gathered at their…
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