"Poplar " is one in a series of paintings of poplar trees by French Impressionist artist Claude Monet.
Claude Monet 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, Sunrise . Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He... was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs.more
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year. Originally called the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, its founding was inspired by the South Kensington Museum in London, which grew out of the... Great Exhibition of 1851. The Museum, at that time housed in the Centennial Exposition's Memorial Hall, opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877. While this location was adequate, it was remote from the vast majority of the city's inhabitants. Construction of the current building began in 1919 when Mayor Thomas B. Smith laid the cornerstone in a Masonic ceremony on the former reservoir land of the decommissioned Fairmount Water Works covering 10 acres of ground. The first section was completed in early 1928. The quasi-Greek Revival design was produced by Horace Trumbauer and the firm of Zantzinger, Borie and Medary. The facade of the building is of Minnesota dolomite.more
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to... prominence during the 1870s and 1880s in spite of harsh opposition from the art community in France. The name of the style is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant , which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities ; common, ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.more