Natural talent: Claude Monet's Le Printemps

No one has ever absorbed the light of nature so ecstatically and released it back on to canvas in such an expressive way as Monet. The genius of impressionism seems to have been possessed by the seasonal goddess Flora herself in this scintillating explosion of the chromatic joy of spring. The garden is his own, at Giverny, and here you can already see him enjoying the kind of heightened, poetic reverie that was to lead him to the abstract light, darkened with memories, of his water lily paintings Illustration: Andrew Norman/The Fitzwilliam Museum