I never appreciated how Claude Monet grew into his style.

These four paintings, beginning in 1867 and ending in 1899, show how he moved from away Realism with flat brushstrokes and towards Impressionism with pointy ones.

But his paintings always vibrated with color.

Monet closed his career as an abstract artist, and admittedly, I don’t like where he ended up as much.

These paintings are from 1917-1919.

This is the Monet I love. The years from 1885-1895 where his paintings were soft and bright like a morning sunrise. – bei The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Monet developed cataracts later in life, which may have contributed to the blurriness of his later paintings.

As his eyesight worsened, colors lost their intensity until his eyesight got so bad that he had to label his tubes of paint. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408507/