French painter Claude Monet was born on this date in 1840. Monet was a leader in the impressionist movement, the practice and theory of depicting the natural appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of bright colors in order to simulate actual reflected light. Here is where a picture is worth a thousand words: to get an impression of impressionism, think water lilies. Monet’s pond at his garden at Giverny inspired some of his best-known series of paintings. (来源：英语学习门户网站EnglishCN.com)

Impressionism came on the art scene around 1870; another 19th-century style of painting concerned with light that was practiced in America was luminism. Luminist painters produced mostly landscapes and seascapes rendered in very precise detail, focusing on the effects of light and the technical problems involved in rendering them.

Post-impressionism emerged several decades after impressionism and encompassed a range of reactions to the earlier style. One of those reactions was Neo-impressionism. Neo-impressionists tried to make impressionism more precise in form; they favored the technique of pointillism or divisionism, the application of dots or tiny strokes of color elements to a surface so that, when seen from a distance, the dots or strokes blend luminously together. In general, post impressionists stressed volume, picture structure, or expressionism over natural representation.