Claude Monet was a French painter and one of the founders of Impressionism, an art movement that captured fleeting light and color instead of sharp, exact detail — the movement's name actually began as an insult, coined by a critic mocking Monet's 1872 painting "Impression, Sunrise." He painted the same scenes, like his garden's water lilies, again and again at different times of day to study how light changed them. His soft, colorful brushwork changed the direction of painting forever.