Claude Monet’s Impression, sunrise has had a lasting impact on modern art and led to the naming of one of its best-known movements—Impressionism. But Monet did not create his painting in a vacuum. Various artists and their painting techniques helped the young man to develop his ideas and to hone the now-signature rough, immediate and unfinished style captured so distinctively in this seminal work.

Monet’s influences stretched beyond his friends, teachers and mentors such as Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind, to artists working earlier in the nineteenth century, a period when landscape painting changed dramatically. British painters, especially JMW Turner and Richard Parkes Bonington, had inspired the French Barbizon School and Realist artists including Charles Daubigny, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet. In the late nineteenth century, pure landscape became recognised as a serious and meaningful genre of painting. Monet was central: using oil paint on canvas to capture fleeting moments and fluctuating conditions, he forever changed attitudes to landscape, painting and art.