Who Was Claude Monet?
Claude Monet was a French artist who lived a long time ago, from 1840 to 1926. He is one of the most famous painters in the whole world, and his paintings hang in museums everywhere!
Monet was part of a group of artists called Impressionists. They got this name because their paintings capture an impression of a moment, the way light and color look at a particular time of day. Their paintings are not super detailed or realistic — instead, they are dreamy, soft, and full of beautiful colors.
Monet loved painting outdoors! He would set up his easel in gardens, by rivers, and in fields to capture how sunlight changed throughout the day. He sometimes painted the same scene over and over at different times to show how the light changed from morning to evening.
His most famous paintings are of water lilies in his beautiful garden in Giverny, France. He had a pond with a Japanese bridge and hundreds of water lilies, and he painted them more than 250 times!