Claude Monet was one of the most important of the artists who developed the Impressionist movement. Monet experimented with the effects of atmosphere and light, and what concerned him more and more were the techniques required to effect a direct transcription of visual sensation to the canvas. His works show a variety while also reflecting the deepest concerns of the artist in a consistent fashion:
Neither his choices of subject nor his modes of seeing, composing, and executing were accidental, nor were they dictated by a systematic theory. . . Yet, beneath the eddies in the flow of his art always lay an unswerving determination to paint truthfully the world in which he lived (Seitz 337).
Paris in the nineteenth century was the center of the art world, and a large number of brilliant artists collected in the same region and worked at the same time in this city. They endured years of rebuff and suffering, but together they completely changed the course of Western art. They lived in Montmartre, a little village on a steep cliff overlooking Paris, and by 1860 this village had become a part of the city itself. It still had a village atmosphere, however, and it was quaint and picturesque and cheap. The little village was the center of Bohemian life, and this life took place in the cafes of the area where the artists would congregate and discuss their art. This was also a city of wealth at the time, and this contributed to the support of the arts by a number of collectors. The rulers of France had little cultivation in the arts, and their taste and the taste of the public was instead formed by the board of judges of the official Salon. The artists of Montmartre rebelled against this system and chose to be isolated, far from the Salon. They asserted their independence in various ways, from the way they dressed to their art itself. They painted in a new way, a way not accepted by the Salon in any case.
Claude Monet was ...