Oscar-Claude Monet (/mone/; French: [klod mn]; 14 November 1840

5 December 1926) was 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.[1][2] 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 adopt a
method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the
changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in
Giverny, where he purchased a house and property, and began a vast
landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects
of his best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in
vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the
series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next
20 years of his life.
From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection
from the conservative Acadmie des Beaux-Arts which held its annual
exhibition at the Salon de Paris. During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley organized the Socit
anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (Cooperative and
Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers) to exhibit their
artworks independently. At their first exhibition, held in April 1874, Monet
exhibited the work that was to give the group its lasting name.
Impression, Sunrise was painted in 1872, depicting a Le Havre port landscape.
From the painting's title the art critic Louis Leroy, in his review, "L'Exposition
des Impressionnistes," which appeared in Le Charivari, coined the term
"Impressionism".[3] It was intended as disparagement but the Impressionists
appropriated the term for themselves.[
Biography
Birth and childhood
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue
Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.[6] He was the second son of Claude
Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubre Monet, both of them second-
generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish
church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him
simply Oscar.[6][7] (He signed his juvenilia "O. Monet".) Despite being baptized
Catholic, Monet later became an atheist.[8][9]
In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to
go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His
mother was a singer.
On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals
knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to
twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-
Franois Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of
Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugne Boudin, who became his
mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air"
(outdoor) techniques for painting.[10] Both received the influence of Johan
Barthold Jongkind.
On 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and
went to live with his widowed, childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
The Woman in the Green Dress, Camille Doncieux, 1866, Kunsthalle Bremen
Paris
When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying
from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he
would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. [11] Monet was in
Paris for several years and met other young painters, including douard Manet
and others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists.
In June 1861, Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria
for a seven-year commitment, but, two years later, after he had contracted
typhoid fever, his aunt intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to
complete an art course at an art school. It is possible that the Dutch painter
Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on
this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862
Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, Frdric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new
approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color
and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.

Le djeuner sur l'herbe, (right section), 18651866, with Gustave Courbet,

Frdric Bazille and Camille Doncieux, first wife of the artist, Muse d'Orsay,
Paris[12]
In January 1865 Monet was working on a version of Le djeuner sur l'herbe,
aiming to present it for hanging at the Salon, which had rejected Manet's Le
djeuner sur l'herbe two years earlier.[13] Monet's painting was very large and
could not be completed in time. (It was later cut up, with parts now in different
galleries.) Monet submitted instead a painting of Camille or The Woman in the
Green Dress (La femme la robe verte), one of many works using his future
wife, Camille Doncieux, as his model. Both this painting and a small landscape
were hung.[13] The following year Monet used Camille for his model in Women in
the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt in 1868. Camille
became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean, in 1867.[14] Monet and
Camille married on 28 June 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-
Prussian War,[15] and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they moved
to Argenteuil, in December 1871. During this time Monet painted various works
of modern life. He and Camille lived in poverty for most of this period. Following
the successful exhibition of some maritime paintings, and the winning of a
silver medal at Le Havre, Monet's paintings were seized by creditors, from
whom they were bought back by a shipping merchant, Gaudibert, who was also
a patron of Boudin.[13]
Franco-Prussian War and Argenteuil
After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870), Monet and his
family took refuge in England in September 1870, [16] where he studied the
works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose
landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color. In
the spring of 1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation for inclusion in
the Royal Academy exhibition.[15]
In May 1871, he left London to live in Zaandam, in the Netherlands,[15] where he
made twenty-five paintings (and the police suspected him of revolutionary
activities).[17] He also paid a first visit to nearby Amsterdam. In October or
November 1871, he returned to France. From December 1871 to 1878 he lived
at Argenteuil, a village on the right bank of the Seine river near Paris, and a
popular Sunday-outing destination for Parisians, where he painted some of his
best-known works. In 1873, Monet purchased a small boat equipped to be used
as a floating studio.[18] From the boat studio Monet painted landscapes and also
portraits of douard Manet and his wife; Manet in turn depicted Monet painting
aboard the boat, accompanied by Camille, in 1874. [18] In 1874, he briefly
returned to Holland.[19]
Impressionism

Madame Monet in a Japanese kimono, 1875, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The first Impressionist exhibition was held in 1874 at 35 boulevard des
Capucines, Paris, from 15 April to 15 May. The primary purpose of the
participants was not so much to promote a new style, but to free themselves
from the constraints of the Salon de Paris. The exhibition, open to anyone
prepared to pay 60 francs, gave artists the opportunity to show their work
without the interference of a jury. [20][21][22]
Renoir chaired the hanging committee and did most of the work himself, as
others members failed to present themselves.[20][21]
In addition to Impression: Sunrise (pictured above) Monet presented four oil
paintings and seven pastels. Among the paintings he displayed was The
Luncheon (1868), which features Camille Doncieux and Jean Monet, and which
had been rejected by the Paris Salon of 1870. [23] Also in this exhibition was a
painting titled Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard done from
the photographer Nadar's apartment at no. 35. Monet painted the subject
twice, and it is uncertain which of the two pictures, that now in the Pushkin
Museum in Moscow, or that in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City,
was the painting that appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, though
more recently the Moscow picture has been favoured. [24][25][26] Altogether, 165
works were exhibited in the exhibition, including 4 oils, 2 pastels and 3
watercolors by Morisot; 6 oils and 1 pastel by Renoir; 10 works by Degas; 5 by
Pissarro; 3 by Czanne; and 3 by Guillaumin. Several works were on loan,
including Czanne's Modern Olympia, Morisot's Hide and Seek (owned by
Manet) and 2 landscapes by Sisley that had been purchased by Durand-Ruel. [20]
[21][22]

The total attendance is estimated at 3500, and some works did sell, though
some exhibitors had placed their prices too high. Pissarro was asking 1000
francs for The Orchard and Monet the same for Impression: Sunrise, neither of
which sold. Renoir failed to obtain the 500 francs he was asking for La Loge,
but later sold it for 450 francs to Pre Martin, dealer and supporter of the
group.[

Death
Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried
in the Giverny church cemetery.[40] Monet had insisted that the occasion be
simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony. [49]
His home, garden, and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his
only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in
1966. Through the Fondation Claude Monet, the house and gardens were
opened for visits in 1980, following restoration. [50] In addition to souvenirs of
Monet and other objects of his life, the house contains his collection of
Japanese woodcut prints. The house and garden, along with the Museum of
Impressionism Giverny, are major attractions in Giverny, which hosts tourists
from all over the world.
Monet's methods

Rouen Cathedral at sunset, 1893, Muse Marmottan Monet. An example of the

Rouen Cathedral Series.
Monet has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism". [51]
Crucial to the art of the Impressionist painters was the understanding of the
effects of light on the local colour of objects, and the effects of the
juxtaposition of colours with each other. [52] Monet's long career as a painter was
spent in the pursuit of this aim.
In 1856, his chance meeting with Eugene Boudin, a painter of small beach
scenes, opened his eyes to the possibility of plein-air painting. From that time,
with a short interruption for military service, he dedicated himself to searching
for new and improved methods of painterly expression. To this end, as a young
man, he visited the Paris Salon and familiarised himself with the works of older
painters, and made friends with other young artists. [51] The five years that he
spent at Argenteuil, spending much time on the River Seine in a little floating
studio, were formative in his study of the effects of light and reflections. He
began to think in terms of colours and shapes rather than scenes and objects.
He used bright colours in dabs and dashes and squiggles of paint. Having
rejected the academic teachings of Gleyre's studio, he freed himself from
theory, saying "I like to paint as a bird sings." [53]
In 1877 a series of paintings at St-Lazare Station had Monet looking at smoke
and steam and the way that they affected colour and visibility, being
sometimes opaque and sometimes translucent. He was to further use this
study in the painting of the effects of mist and rain on the landscape. [54] The
study of the effects of atmosphere were to evolve into a number of series of
paintings in which Monet repeatedly painted the same subject in different
lights, at different hours of the day, and through the changes of weather and
season. This process began in the 1880s and continued until the end of his life
in 1926.
His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different
points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were
exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891. In 1892 he produced what is
probably his best-known series, twenty-six views of Rouen Cathedral.[52] In
these paintings Monet broke with painterly traditions by cropping the subject so
that only a portion of the facade is seen on the canvas. The paintings do not
focus on the grand Medieval building, but on the play of light and shade across
its surface, transforming the solid masonry. [55]
Other series include Poplars, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies that
were painted on his property at Giverny. Between 1883 and 1908, Monet
traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and
seascapes, including a series of paintings in Venice. In London he painted four
series: the Houses of Parliament, London, Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo
Bridge, and Views of Westminster Bridge. Helen Gardner writes:
"Monet, with a scientific precision, has given us an unparalleled and unexcelled
record of the passing of time as seen in the movement of light over identical
forms

CLAUDE MONET SYNOPSIS

Claude Monet was among the leaders of the French Impressionist movement of
the 1870s and 1880s. His 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise gave the style its
name, and as an inspirational talent and a personality, he was crucial in
bringing its adherents together. Inspired in the 1860s by the Realists' interest in
painting in the open air, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its
most famous pinnacles with his so-called series paintings, in which his
observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were
captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Masterful as a colorist and as a
painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable
degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent
generations of abstract painters.
CLAUDE MONET KEY IDEAS
Monet's early work is indebted to the Realists' interests in depicting
contemporary subject matter, without idealization, and in painting outdoors in
order to capture the fleeting qualities of nature.
Inspired in part by Edouard Manet, Monet gradually began to develop a
distinctive style of his own in the late 1860s. He departed from the clear
depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the
established art of the time, and he experimented with loose handling, bold
color, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures
shifted from figures to the qualities of light and the atmosphere in the scene,
and, as he matured, he became ever more attentive to light and color.
In his later years, Monet also became increasingly sensitive to the decorative
qualities of color and form. He began to apply paint in smaller strokes, building
it up in broad fields of color, and, in the 1880s, he began to explore the
possibilities of a decorative paint surface and harmonies and contrasts of color.
The effects that he achieved, particularly in the series paintings of the 1890s,
represent a remarkable advance towards abstraction and towards a modern
painting focused purely on surface effects.
An inspiration and a leader among the Impressionists, he was crucial in
attracting Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edouard Manet and Camille
Pissarro to work alongside each other in the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil in the
1870s. He was also important in establishing the exhibition society that would
showcase the group's work between 1874 and 1886.