Claude Monet

In this glimpse of his wife and son in a flowering meadow, Monet captured the movement of light across the landscape by highlighting a diagonal course of grasses and juxtaposing their yellow-green hues to the complementary orange-reds of poppies in the foreground. Responding directly to his observations, he rendered the figures with short notational marks and used soft, wide brushstrokes in the sky and middle distance to suggest the optical blur of an overcast day. In this informal view of figures in nature, he emphasized atmospheric sensations over traditional notions of subject matter, anticipating the critical contention that “impressionists” painted random views of modern life with self-invented technique.