Open Culture – “To know anything about the school of painting called Impressionism, one must know Claude Monet, who gave the movement its name with his painting Impression, Sunrise and provided its method — an almost confrontational relationship with landscape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom,” Monet wrote in a letter to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1890. “It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one crazy trying to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tackling.” That “kind of thing,” the compulsion to paint nature in motion, required working quickly, repeating the same experiments over and over, despairing of getting it right, producing in the attempt his glorious series of haystacks and water lilies. Monet began painting landscapes upon meeting artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he never stopped, refining his brushstroke for almost seventy years: from his first canvas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, finished in 1926, the final year of his life…”