Monet painted this seductive panorama of the The Staircase at Vétheuil near his home at Vétheuil, the bright sky filled with cottony banks of cumulus, the tranquil landscape gently stirred by a passing breeze. Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting.