In November 1872 Claude Monet painted this small 48 × 63 cm canvas at the window of the Le Havre harbour, where he had grown up, in a single session at dawn. Through the mist that swallows cranes, smoke, and boats, an orange sun reflects on the water. The painting was shown in April 1874 at an independent exhibition organised by thirty artists outside the official Salon, in the studio of the photographer Nadar.

The critic Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical magazine *Le Charivari*, reviewed the show in a mocking dialogue: 'Impression — I was certain of it. There has to be an impression in there somewhere; but even wallpaper in its sketched state is more finished than that seascape.' The piece labelled the entire group 'Impressionists' — initially as an insult, but the term gradually became the movement's official name.

Monet's innovation was deliberate. In classical painting, a 'finished' work had its brushstrokes erased, its subjects sharp, its light stable. Here everything is reversed: brushstrokes are countable; boats are described with a few dark horizontal strokes; the boundary between sky and water is lost; the sun — that orange disc — is in fact not brighter than the surrounding sky in objective luminance, but appears brighter to the eye (a perceptual effect modern research can explain).

Monet said he wanted to paint not what the eye sees but 'what the eye thinks it sees'. That sentence became the summary of painting's century-long shift from object to perception.

The canvas was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in 1985 and recovered five years later in Corsica. It hangs there still.