Claude Monet Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (; ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) 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. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting "Impression, soleil levant" ("Impression, Sunrise"), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to
Hussein of Jordan through four turbulent decades of the Arab-Israel conflict and the Cold War, successfully balancing pressures from Arab nationalists, Soviet Union, Western countries and Israel. In 1980, an Israeli intelligence report described Hussein to be as "a man trapped on a bridge burning at both ends, with crocodiles in the river beneath him." Hussein considered the Palestinian issue to be the overriding national security issue, even after Jordan lost the West Bank in 1967 and after it renounced claims to it in 1988. Initially, Hussein attempted to unite both banks of the Jordan River as one people, but with the formation