Sponsored by The Adult School and the Kemmerer Library Harding Township

Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir both launched their careers as young, pioneering Impressionists united by a passion for painting outdoors, attending closely to natural light, atmospheric change, movement, and perspective, and building compositions from direct visual experience rather than intellectual concept. They shared, too, a fascination with the modern metropolis and the vividly novel life of a burgeoning middle class: new fashions, bathing, cafés, and the pleasures of contemporary leisure. As their careers matured, however, the two artists diverged. Renoir turned increasingly toward the human figure, while Monet moved in the direction of abstraction which culminated in his revolutionary series of waterlilies.