u/tomgurney

Most people know that Japanese prints influenced Van Gogh, but I was surprised to discover just how deeply they affected Claude Monet too.

At Giverny, Monet filled entire rooms with ukiyo-e prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro and Kunisada. His famous Japanese bridge, water garden and even parts of the Water Lilies compositions seem tied to ideas he absorbed from Japanese art.

The more I looked into it, the more obvious it became:

• asymmetrical compositions
• cropped views
• reflections replacing horizons
• decorative surfaces
• atmospheric rain and mist effects

Even Monet’s house itself feels like a dialogue between Impressionism and Japanese aesthetics.

I ended up researching the rooms at Giverny, identifying prints on the walls, and tracing how they fed into paintings like the Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies series.

Would love to know whether others think Monet was the European artist most transformed by Japonisme?

Most people today see Jean-François Millet’s paintings as peaceful, even nostalgic.

But in the 1850s, works like The Gleaners and The Sower actually made some viewers uncomfortable — even nervous.

At the time, France had just gone through the 1848 Revolution, and Millet’s focus on rural labourers wasn’t seen as neutral. Critics worried that showing peasants on such a monumental scale gave them too much dignity, even political weight.

What’s interesting is that Millet himself didn’t present these figures as heroic revolutionaries. They’re quiet, grounded, and often anonymous — yet somehow they still carried a powerful social presence.

Do you think these paintings were genuinely political, or are we projecting modern interpretations onto them?