Claude Monet

He only went to Venice the once, fairly late on, and apparently didn't finish much of it there — the canvases came home with him and got worked over in the studio for years after. There's more than one version of this same view.

Wikipedia has this down as the earliest painting of his that anyone knows about, done when he was seventeen, out by a stream near Le Havre. It's signed with the name Oscar — apparently that was the first half of his actual name, and he dropped it in his twenties.

A whole movement got its name from a review mocking this one — the critic used the word as an insult, supposedly, and it stuck. It hung in a show the painters put on themselves after the official one kept turning them down.

Monet reportedly dug a trench in the garden so he could lower a huge canvas down and keep painting the top half without moving it — his soon-to-be wife modeled for all four women, apparently.

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

He only went to Venice once, apparently, and finished most of the paintings from that trip back home afterwards, working from memory.

One of the late garden pictures, painted when his eyesight was going badly — cataracts, which he put off having operated on for years. Canvases like this sat around unwanted for decades afterwards, and it's said they only got taken seriously once abstract painting had come along and given people a way to like them.

They say he worked on a whole stack of canvases at once from a hospital terrace across the river, swapping to a fresh one every time the light shifted, then spent years finishing the lot back home in France. The fog wasn't getting in the way of what he came for — from what I've read it was the reason he came.

This stretch of the Seine just outside Paris was where he lived for years — a town people came out to from the city by train to mess about in boats. He painted that same water over and over, and had a boat rigged up as a floating studio to do it from, apparently.

Apparently he painted the same pond in his own garden something like two hundred times. By this point his eyesight was going — cataracts — and people still argue about how much that's doing to the colours.