Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840–1926) gave Impressionism its name by accident. When he showed Impression, Sunrise at the group's first independent exhibition in 1874, a hostile critic seized on the title as a label for the whole enterprise, and it stuck. The method behind it was deliberate: paint outdoors, paint quickly, and record the light of a particular moment rather than the fixed local colour of an object.

His landscapes fall into distinct campaigns. The Argenteuil years of the 1870s produced sunlit river scenes and the figures-in-the-open pictures, including the National Gallery of Art's Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son, of 1875. From 1883 he worked at Giverny, where he built the garden and water-lily pond that occupied the last three decades of his life, and where the serial approach reached its logical end: the same subject painted dozens of times, the only variable being weather, season, and hour.

Monet is the reason the phrase “Monet landscape painting” is almost a tautology. Even his portraits and interiors are organised around light falling across a surface, which is exactly the quality semantic search can match on. Describe the weather, the water, and the time of day rather than the artist, and the results will find him on their own.