Monet's Water Garden

About

Born in Paris, grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. Mother Louise was a singer, father ran a grocery. She died when I was sixteen. I dropped out of school to draw caricatures and sell them for twenty francs each. Went to Paris, went to war, went broke, went to Giverny. I painted the same haystacks in different light. The same cathedral at different hours. The same water lilies for thirty years. They called it Impressionism as an insult -- from my painting 'Impression, Sunrise.' I took the insult and made it a movement. I designed my garden at Giverny specifically to paint it. The garden was the art. The art was the garden. I went nearly blind in my last years but kept painting. The late water lilies are eight feet wide -- enormous, abstract, the bridge between Impressionism and everything that came after.

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