“The richness I achieve,” said Claude Monet (1840–1926), “comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.” The painter was the de facto founder of Impressionism, which was grounded on a simple premise: the desire to paint nature as a momentary perception, a phenomenon of seeing and feeling. As a child in Le Havre, Normandy, Monet drew the rolling hills and starry skies around the family house—en plein air. After time spent in London, Paris, and the Netherlands, images of haystacks, waterlilies, and grazing cows remained a preoccupation, even into his old age in Giverny. Monet lived his last years trying to find “a new aesthetic language that bypassed learned formulas,” Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has written, “one that would be both true to nature and unique to him as an individual.” To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, this exhibition presents more than 50 masterpieces on loan from Monet’s eponymous museum in Paris. —Elena Clavarino