Claude Monet was probably the greatest painter of the impressionist group and, throughout his long life, its most unswerving representative. He was devoted to the representation of visual impressions, of light and color, rather than sharp forms in dramatic compositions. He spent little time studying the old masters, but he worked with Courbet, admired Manet, and was aware of Turner and of Japanese art. He lived much of his life in poverty, becoming known only gradually. He liked to paint series---or variations---on the same theme, like the Poplars, the Haystacks, and Rouen Cathedral.
In 1883 Monet settled at Giverny, where he made himself an elaborate garden. He spent the rest of his life there, and it was there that he painted---again and again---his famous Waterlilies. The almost abstract patterns of his late works, completed as blindness was setting in, anticipate abstract expressionism.
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