Art by Claude Monet

Monet's 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise, a hazy, quickly brushed view of Le Havre harbor, gave an entire movement its name after a critic used the word "impression" mockingly, and the label stuck as a badge of pride. He spent his later decades largely in one place, his garden at Giverny, painting the same water lily pond over and over in different light, work that got progressively looser and more abstract as cataracts clouded his eyesight, changing how he actually saw color on the canvas. His earlier series paintings of the same subject at different times of day, haystacks, Rouen Cathedral's façade, treated repetition itself as the real subject: not the object, but time passing over it.