To all those who would so readily dismiss Monet, and Impressionism in general, as a “simple” and shallow movement, I’d urge you to reconsider:

“What makes these pictures look so modern has partly to do, as every art museum docent points out, with their lack of foreground and background and the obvious debt to Japan. But mostly it’s to do with the aspiration to render the intangible — to make millions of material facts immaterial and unshackle them from time…the effervescent pleasure of seeing and the inevitable disappearance of that pleasure…His pictures ‘make us adore a field, a sky, a beach, a river as though these were shrines which we long to visit, shrines we lose faith in when we see.’”

—Michael Kimmelman, Paris Rediscovers Monet’s Magic at Grand Palais