“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life-the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”

Oscar-Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting.

Monet and other like-minded artists rejected the conservative art and exhibited their artworks independently. They began to use a new way of painting when they didn't mix paints but put them on to the canvas with the help of their paintbrush by separate strokes. At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that was to give the group its lasting name. The Impresssion Sunrise (1872)

Monet was the most convinced and consistent Impressionist of them all. From his earliest days as an artist, he was encouraged to trust his perceptions and the hardships he suffered never deterred him from that pursuit. Devoting himself to the painting of landscapes in bright sunlight, he has carried the pitch of painting into a higher key than any artist before him had done. The Japanise Bridge (1899)

A friend of Monet's, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits; it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction. Madam Monet and a Child in a Garden (1875)

"Pine-Trees at Antibes" is a beautiful example of his style. Radiant colors are laid side by side in small broken touches to suggest the vibration of light. Light is always the «principal person» in Monet's landscape, and since he is always aiming at seizing a fugitive effect, his aim was to give a serial, continuous impressions of the most minute transformations of light. Pine-Trees at Antibes (1888)

Monet's renowned series of the cathedral at Rouen seen under different light effects was painted from a second-floor window above a shop opposite the facade. He made eighteen frontal views. Changing canvases with the light, Monet had followed the hours of the day from early morning with the facade in misty blue shadow, to the afternoon, when it is flooded with sun, and finally to the end of the day when the sunset, disappearing behind the buildings of the city, waves the weathered stone work into a strange fabric of burnt orange and blue.

The Rouan Cathedral…….

For an Impressionist it is not important what he paints but it is important how he paints and as these feelings are always changing the painters worked a lot to catch these disappearing moments. And they reached incredible results when they showed glimmer, shades and light on their canvases. One of these painters was Claude Monet. Windmill (1871)

Claude Monet was the great painter who paid much attention to light, its shades and who idolized nature. With the help of his canvases the painter gives us an opportunity to see the world through his eyes, gives us a chance to feel the way he feels. William Hazlitt said, « We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts». Poppy Field (1886)

In conclusion I'd like to recite Claude Monet's words: "People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love."