Turns out he couldn’t hold on to these babies because in 1991, Monet’s pivotal piece was discovered in Corsica. A Japanese criminal mastermind who went by the name Shuinichi Fujikama was the brains behind the operation. Makes sense…if you’re going to steal some priceless art, make sure you scare the bejesus out of everyone to cover up your tracks. Apparently, the gunmen leading the heist left the guards trembling with mortal fear. Claude Monet was in almost every sense the founder of French Impressionist painting, the term itself coming from one of his paintings, Impression, Sunrise. The impressionist emblem has long been a much-coveted object by art thieves, and the painting was stolen in 1985 in an armed robbery, along with Renoir’s Bathers and several more. It was 7:35 a.m., in case you’re wondering. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Claude Monets painting Impression, soleil levant and the dedicated exhibition Facing the Sun - a star in the. In 2014, a nerdy professor over in Texas managed to figure out the exact time at which the painting was made. Dunno how the critic would feel if he were alive today and saw how his acid quill had made an addition so epic to art history. It was this that led Monet and his rebel contemporaries to be labeled Impressionists. But it gets worse…the critic dubbed this painting and all others like it to be mere “impressions” because the paint was so sketchily applied and the works were so unfinished.

It was a mean art critic named Louis Leroy who saw the painting in 1874 and quilled down these harsh words: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” Rude. Well, it doesn’t just boil down to Monet daubing bits of broken colour on his canvas…not quite. You may have heard of a little movement called “Impressionism,” which grabbed Paris by the baguette in the late 19th century.įunny story behind the name “Impressionism”: It all started when Claude Monet took his easel and canvas outside and painted a couple of boats in the sunset. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (detail), 1874, oil on canvas, 50 × 65 cm (Musée Marmottan, Paris) What we see when we look at the painting is unquestionably painted Monet made no effort to develop his suggestive image into a more detailed and finished rendering of the scene.

Impression sunrise