Impression, soleil levant

Good morning. The air is soft and sleepy. The water is a dreamy, hazy blue, with little dark shapes that look like boats bobbing up and down. Up in the sky, a big, bright orange ball is peeking out. Hello, sun. The sun makes a wiggly orange path on the water that dances and shimmers. It feels so quiet and peaceful. Everything is soft, like a dream you just woke up from. I am a special kind of dream on a canvas. My name is Impression, soleil levant. In French, that means Impression, Sunrise. I show you what a sleepy, sunny morning feels like.

A man with a kind face and a big, bushy beard made me. His name was Claude Monet. He was my painter. One day in the year 1872, he looked out his window. He saw the big boats and the water in a town called Le Havre in France. The sun was just waking up, and he wanted to remember that feeling forever. So he got his paints and his brush. He painted very, very quickly. Dab-dab-dab went his brush. A dab of orange for the sun. A dab of blue for the water. He wasn't trying to make me look perfect. He just wanted to paint the feeling of that beautiful, hazy morning before it disappeared.

When people first saw me, they were very surprised. They said, 'This doesn't look finished. It looks fuzzy.' On April 15th, 1874, a writer saw my name, 'Impression,' and used it to talk about my painter and his friends. He called them the Impressionists. And the name stuck. They were a whole new team of artists who loved to paint feelings and light. I helped give them their name. Today, I hang in a big museum in a city called Paris. I love when little children come to see me. I remind them that every sunrise is a beautiful, magical painting, full of wonder and happy feelings for a brand new day.