Impression, Sunrise

History

Monet painted the harbour of Le Havre, his home town, from a hotel window, quickly, in thin strokes of grey and blue around a small orange sun. He showed it in Paris in 1874 at the first exhibition of the group. Asked for a title for the catalogue, he said to put Impression, and the critic Louis Leroy used the word to mock them all. The name stuck. In 2014 astronomers worked out the morning from the sun and the tides: 13 November 1872, around 7.35. It was stolen from the museum in 1985 and found five years later.