Claude Monet - Impression, Sunrise

Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), 1872 - Claude Monet, oil on canvas. Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) was a French Impressionist painter. Monet painted this dawn view from a hotel window overlooking the outer harbour of Le Havre around November 1872. Quays, cranes and steamships dissolve into autumn mist, while a small orange sun and its reflection provide the strongest colour. He showed the painting at the first independant group exhibition in 1874, calling it simply "Impression" because it could hardly pass for a view of Le Havre. Critic Louis Leroy mocked the exhibitors as "Impressionists" in his review; the name was soon reclaimed more positively by another critic. The work became an emblem of the movement it inadvertently helped name.