OIL PAINTING: Poppies at Giverny, 1887
Monet, as everyone knows, was primarily a landscape painter. But early in his career, Monet painted portraits, still lifes and interiors which showed amazing ability in these types of images, also. He simply preferred the landscape, and water in particular, first the seacoast, then the Seine River, and finally the pond in his garden at Giverny. Monet,
Renoir, and by this time Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, Bazille, and at this point Cezanne, and others were now joining together in their new vision of painting. Monet's first landscapes, although freshly and boldly painted, had not been so very far from the officially accepted
rules of painting.