Beautifully framed ARTAGRAPH LIMITED EDITION of Claude Monet's Still Life (27"x21)

*Only 3,000 in circulation

Monet painted Still Life With Melon in 1872. The artist and his wife had just come back to France a year earlier, after fleeing the outburst of the Franco-Prussian War, and settled down in a small city called Argenteuil where they lived for about seven years. During this time, Monet still worked with traditional painting techniques and attempted to produce still-life paintings - although this was not a typical subject for him.

Oscar-Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (translation: Impression, sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.

Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. He began painting the water lilies in 1899, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.