Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. In later years he experimented with optical color mixing techniques, in his series paintings. The most famous of these series paintings are the Rouen cathedral series of paintings which capture the façade of the cathedral at different times of the day and year, and reflect changes in its appearance under different lighting conditions, and the haystack series which similarly capture light effects at different times of the day. Another famous series was the series of paintings he did of the Houses of Parliament on the Thames River in London. I have spent a lot of time studying all of these paintings and his techniques. Monet was important because in addition to his optical color mixing research, he also started to investigate hue changes on a form. This was new to painting and took color to a more sophisicated level than the classical realist type of paintings.. In general Monet noticed the hue changes, but did not fully master the saturation changes which later painters, such as Bongart and Hensche studied and further developed in the 20th century.
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