Claude Monet was a maverick. He went against the grain.

When this french painter first traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. This was unheard of back in the 1800s. His style of painting helped to lead a new approach to art, painting the effects of light in the open air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later became known as Impressionism.

This image, processed with an impressionistic style, is his own gardens and pond in Giverny, France. Many of his paintings contained this pond with its water lilies, row boats and bridge. We bought a poster of a painting of his many years ago at a garage sale, but never fathomed that we would one day travel to that exact spot.