Claude Monet

Paris holds Monet in three different institutions, each essential. The Musée d'Orsay has the most famous Impressionist canvases ever made — works from the early and middle periods that defined a movement. The Musée Marmottan Monet holds over 300 works and the original Impression, Sunrise, the 1872 painting that gave Impressionism its name. And the Musée de l'Orangerie was designed by Monet himself as a permanent home for the vast Water Lilies panels: two oval rooms of canvas where the boundary between painting and environment dissolves completely.

London drew him repeatedly. From the 1870s onwards he visited to paint the Thames at dawn and dusk from his room at the Savoy Hotel — Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, the Houses of Parliament dissolving in layers of fog. The resulting series is scattered between Paris and London; the National Gallery and the Courtauld hold some of the finest examples. He returned more than thirty times. The city was as much a subject as Normandy or the garden at Giverny.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Städel in Frankfurt, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich — across Europe, significant Monet works appear in almost every major collection. His garden at Giverny in Normandy, eighty kilometres from Paris, is open from April to November: the lily pond and Japanese bridge still there, the same view he painted again and again and again.