Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840 - 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.

i was born undisciplined . never , even as a child , could i be made to obey a set rule . what little i know i learned at home . school was always like a prison to me , i could never bring myself to stay there , even four hours a day , when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting , and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows . such , to the great despair of my parents , was the unruly but healthy life i lived until i was fourteen or fifteen . in the meantime i somehow picked up the rudiments of reading , writing and arithmetic , with a smattering of spelling . and there my schooling ended . it never worried me very much because i always had plenty of amusements on the side . i doodled in the margins of my books , i decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings , and i drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as i could , distorting them out of all recognition.