How Did Impressionism Get Its Name? Claude Monet, a Sunrise and a Critic's Insult

Impressionism got its name from an insult. In April 1874 a group of independent artists held an exhibition in Paris at the premises of the photographer Nadar, and one of the works on show was Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a hazy view of the harbour of Le Havre. The critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review in the satirical paper Le Charivari titled "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", sneering that "wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape." The label stuck. A word meant to dismiss the painters as sloppy became the name of one of the most loved movements in art history, and Monet became its most famous face.

A caricaturist from Le Havre

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, where his family moved in 1845. His father wanted him to join the family's ship-chandling and grocery business. His mother, a singer, encouraged his interest in art. As a teenager he became locally known for his caricatures, which he sold for money from around the age of fifteen.

His mother died in 1857. Soon afterwards he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who taught him to paint outdoors, en plein air, directly in front of the scene rather than in a studio. Monet regarded Boudin as his master. That single lesson, paint what you see, in the light you see it, shaped the rest of his life.

Paris, Algeria and a circle of friends

Monet moved to Paris in 1859 and studied at the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro. In 1861 he was called up for military service and sent to Algeria with a cavalry regiment, but after he caught typhoid his aunt paid to release him from the army.

Back in Paris he joined the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille, who became his closest friend. He left after disagreeing with the way nature was taught. These friendships would later form the core of the Impressionist group.

Camille, poverty and the Salon

In the 1860s the official Salon decided which artists were seen. Monet had some early success there, including The Woman in the Green Dress (1866), a portrait of Camille Doncieux, but the juries accepted his work only in 1866 and 1868. In 1867 Camille gave birth to their son Jean, and Monet's father cut off his financial support. The couple married in June 1870, just before the Franco-Prussian War.

They spent the war in London and the Netherlands. In London Monet studied the paintings of Constable and Turner and befriended the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become a crucial supporter of the Impressionists.

The painting behind the name

Impression, Sunrise shows the port of Le Havre at dawn: an orange sun, its reflection broken into quick strokes on grey-blue water, boats reduced to dark silhouettes. When he was asked for a title for the exhibition catalogue, Monet later explained, he answered: "Put Impression." The art historian Paul Smith has suggested the word may also have helped deflect criticism that the work looked unfinished.

The painting even has a precise "time stamp". In 2014 the astronomer Donald Olson and colleagues used the position of the sun, tide tables, weather records and the direction of smoke plumes to conclude that Monet painted it on the morning of 13 November 1872, at about 7:35. It now hangs in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, after being stolen in 1985 and recovered in 1990.

Leroy himself later softened. He said the group was one "whose majority had nothing impressionist". And Monet grew tired of the label too: in a 1906 letter he complained that the title "does not mean much and has made people tell so much nonsense."

Loss and a new family

The years after 1874 were hard. Camille fell seriously ill, and after the birth of their second son, Michel, in 1878, she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1879. Monet painted her on her deathbed and later confessed to Georges Clemenceau that he had found himself analysing the colours of her face, an experience that was "both a joy and a torment."

In 1883 Monet and Alice Hoschedé, with their combined children, rented a house in Giverny, a village in Normandy. It became his home for the rest of his life. He bought the house in 1890 and married Alice in 1892.

One subject, many lights

By the 1890s Monet was pushing past early Impressionism. Instead of capturing one moment, he painted the same subject again and again to show how light changed it across hours and seasons: the Haystacks (1890–1891), the Poplars and the façade of Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894). The subject almost stopped mattering. What he was really painting was the air and light between himself and the object.

He did the same in London, which he first visited for six weeks in 1899, painting the Thames wrapped in the city's famous fog.

The Water Lilies: a garden as a lifetime's work

At Giverny Monet built gardens and a water garden that became his main source of inspiration for about forty years. The pond and its lilies became the subject of roughly 250 oil paintings, the main focus of the last three decades of his life, and many were painted while he suffered from cataracts.

He died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged 86. A few months later, on 16 May 1927, two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris opened to house eight huge water lily murals permanently. The market has long since caught up with his vision: in 2008 one Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold at Christie's in London for almost £41 million.

Learn with Monet: English phrases for light and looking

Phrase	Meaning	Example
first impression	the opinion you form at first sight	My first impression of the city was grey and foggy.
the name stuck	a nickname became permanent	Critics meant it as an insult, but the name stuck.
in a different light	from a new point of view	After the trip I saw my hometown in a different light.
at the crack of dawn	very early in the morning	He started painting at the crack of dawn.
to have the last laugh	to succeed after being mocked	Monet had the last laugh.

Try this: Look out of a window at two different times today, morning and evening. Write two English sentences for each moment describing the colours you see, and use "in a different light" at least once.