Claude Monet The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil, 1881 Postcard

Claude Monet The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil, 1881 Claude Monet’s lush, light-dappled plein air paintings exemplify the esthetics of the Impressionist movement, which the artist helped establish in late 1800s France. Monet keenly observed and rendered urban environments, his iconic water lily gardens, haystacks, and other pastoral landscapes. He painted each setting over and over again in order to capture changes in light and ambiance. As he evoked the particularities of the environment, his brushstrokes could veer toward abstraction. Both his mark-making and rich color palettes helped establish a path for 20th-century painting. Monet’s work belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many others.