1883 Monet settled at Giverny where he created a magnificent garden. This garden was the inspiration for most of his later work and inspired the series Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge (begun in 1899). As age and deteriorating eyesight descended upon the artist his works lost almost all sense of form and are now referred to as ‘Abstract Impressionism’. C?zanne once said that Monet was “only an eye, but my God, what an eye.” Monet died on December 5, nearly blind?he was known to have said that he “feared the dark more than death.”
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In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. The press derisively labeled them “Impressionists” because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet’s paintings at the exhibition bore the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Mus?e Marmottan, Paris). Monet’s compositions from this time were extremely loosely structured, and the colour was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and colour possible.>
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