Titles Can Make All the Difference

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Impression, Sunrise 1872 Claude Monet
on the wall of the Musée Marmottan Monet

After our pre-pandemic workshop in Provence, we had the delight of visiting Paris for a few days and most especially, of visiting the Musée Marmottan Monet. It is there that Monet’s iconic painting, Impression, Sunrise, resides. It is always a thrill to see paintings that we’ve studied in books, in person—the colors and brush strokes revealing the artist’s hand and mind in a way that no photographic rendition can convey. And, of course, Impression, Sunrise has more than one story to tell.

It is the most well known of a series of six canvases that Monet painted of his hometown of Le Havre in 1872. It was painted from the window of his hotel room looking over the port. Although the term “Impressionism” had been used by others (Manet and Daubigny, for example), it was Monet’s titling of this painting that sparked the term’s general acceptance to de…