Claude Monet was Born: 1840, November 14, Paris, France. In 1858, Claude Monet meets Eugène Boudin who encourages Claude to paint out of doors. In 1859 Claude Monet enters the Swiss Academy. In 1865 Claude Monet paintings are submitted to the official Salon. Claude Monet tries to commit suicide in 1968. Later, in 1869 Claude Monet settles in the village of Saint-Michel where he paints alongside Renoir. During the war Claude Monet takes refuge in London. During 1874, in the studio of Nadar, Claude Monet exhibits "Impression : sunrise" at the first Impressionist exhibition. In 1883 Claude Monet rents a house at Giverny where he will stay for 43 years. By 1907 he is experiencing problems with his eyesight. Claude Monet works on twelve large canvas, "The Water Lilies", which he offers to donate to France following the signing of the Armistice. By 1926, Claude Monet who was a heavy smoker, is suffering from lung cancer. Claude Monet dies on December 5, 1926. During his life, Claude Monet, created more than 2,500 paintings, drawings and pastels.

Claude Monet, was also known, Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 - December 5, 1926). Monet can be regarded as the founder of the impressionist movement of painting. More then anyone else, Monet was the main driver behind the philosophy of the impressionist movement. It was Claude Monet`s painting, Impression, Sunrise, that the term Impressionism was derived. An "impression" for Claude Monet was a special and limited form of sketch, and although the other Impressionists accepted the word as a reasonable description of their aims, Monet himself only used it only when he felt it appropriate to a particular work.

Claude Monet Biography

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Claude Monet`s father was Claude-Adolphe and his mother was Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet. Claude Monet was given his baptism on May 20, 1841 at the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, the Monet family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. Monet`s father had wanted Claude Monet to go into the family grocery store business. But Claude Monet had wanted to become an artist. Claude`s mother was a singer. So on the 1st of of April 1851, Claude Monet attended the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Claude soon became known in the local area for his charcoal caricatures. Money would then sell these charcoal caricatures for ten to twenty francs. Also, Claude Monet started taking drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard. It was during his visit to the beaches of Normandy that Claude Monet had met fellow artist Eugène Boudin. Soo who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin Eugène took on the role as the mentor for Claude Monet. Then on 28 January 1857, Claude Monet`s mother died. Claude Monet was 16 years old when he left school, and moved in with his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

Biography: Claude Monet in France
Claude Monet traveled to Paris to visit the famous Louvre. Here Monet was able to view the painters copying from the old masters. But Claude Monet, who had brought along his paints and tools with him, would instead sit by a window and paint what he saw in the outside world. Claude Monet stayed in Paris for several years. It was here in Paris that the young Monet met with several painters who would eventually become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those who became a close friend was Édouard Manet. Then during the June of 1861, Claude Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria. It was a seven-year commitment, but he only served two years after contracting typhoid. He got out of the army by agreeing to complete an art course at a university. But Claude was soon disillusioned with the traditional art that was taught in the universities. So in 1862, Claude Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris. Here Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they all shared new approaches to art. They painted the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes. This eventually became known as Impressionism. In 1866, Monet completed the work titled, Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte). The painting, which featured Monet`s wife, gained him a lot of recognition. But by 1868, under financial pressure, Claude Monet attempted suicide by jumping into the Seine.

Biography: Claude Monet in England, Zaandam, Amsterdam, France
In September 1870, Claude Monet was forced to go to England with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 19, 1870). During his stay in England Monet studied the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable. Monet gained inspiration from their landscapes and used what he learned later in his use of colour. But the Royal Academy exhibition refused to include the work of Claude Monet in spring of 1871. In May 1871 Claude Monet left London to live in Zaandam, where he made 25 paintings (and the police suspected him of revolutionary activities). He also had a first visit to nearby Amsterdam. In October or November 1871 he returned to France. Claude Monet lived from December 1871 to 1878 at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works. In 1874, Claude Monet briefly returned to Holland. In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended to be derogatory, however the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves. Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (June 28, 1870) and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they had moved into a house in Argenteuil near the Seine River in December 1871. She became ill in 1876. They had a second son, Michel, on March 17, 1878, (Jean was born in 1867). This second child weakened her already fading health. In that same year, Claude Monet moved to the village of Vétheuil. At the age of thirty-two, Madame Monet died on 5 September 1879 of tuberculosis; Monet painted her on her death bed.

Biography: Claude Monet in Giverny
After several difficult months following the death of Camille, a grief stricken Claude Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880's Claude Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what Monet considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. Claude Monet`s extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. Camille Monet became ill with tuberculosis in 1876. Pregnant with her second child she gave birth to Michel Monet in March 1878. In 1878 the Monet's temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hoschedé, (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in Vétheuil during the summer. After her husband was bankrupted, and left in 1878 for Belgium, and after the death of Camille in September 1879, and while Claude Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil; Alice Hoschedé helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children. They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880 Alice Hoschedé and all the children left Paris and rejoined Claude Monet still living in the house in Vétheuil. In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Claude Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny Claude Monet discovered Giverny. In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where Claude Monet planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet in 1892.

At the beginning of May 1883, Claude Monet and his large family rented a house and two acres from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend and the surrounding landscape offered an endless array of suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens and Claude Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings. By November 1890 Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. Within a few years by 1899 Claude Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building, well lit with skylights. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, through the end of his life in 1926, Claude Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. 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 Durand-Ruel in 1891. Claude Monet later produced several series' of paintings including: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Houses of Parliament, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies that were painted on his property at Giverny. Claude Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own gardens in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. Claude Monet also painted up and down the banks of the Seine. Between 1883 and 1908, Claude Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, such as Bordighera. Claude Monet painted an important series of paintings in Venice, Italy, and in London Claude Monet painted two important series views of Parliament and views of Charing Cross Bridge. His second wife Alice died in 1911 and his oldest son Jean, who had married Alice's daughter Blanche, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914. After his wife died, Blanche looked after and cared for him. It was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts. During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. Cataracts formed on Monet's eyes, for which he underwent two surgeries in 1923. The paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery Claude Monet was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations Claude Monet even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.

Biography: Claude Monet the Final Years
Claude Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Claude Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus about fifty people attended the ceremony. His famous home and garden with its waterlily pond were bequeathed by his heirs to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966. Through the Foundation Claude Monet, the home and gardens were opened for visit in 1980, following refurbishment. The home is one of the two main attractions of Giverny, which hosts tourists from all over the world.

In 2004, London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog (Londres, le Parlement, trouée de soleil dans le brouillard) (1904), sold for U.S. $20.1 million. In 2006, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper providing evidence that these were painted in situ at St Thomas' Hospital over the river Thames. Falaises près de Dieppe (Cliffs near Dieppe) has been stolen on two separate occasions. Once in 1998 (in which the museum's curator was convicted of the theft and jailed for five years along with two accomplices) and most recently in August 2007.

Claude Monet Quotes:

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece....Quote by Claude Monet.

It took me time to understand my waterlilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them....Quote by Claude Monet.

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly....Quote by Claude Monet.

I can only draw what I see....Quote by Claude Monet.

The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water....Quote by Claude Monet.

Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment....Quote by Claude Monet.

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even....Quote by Claude Monet.

Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens....Quote by Claude Monet.

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly....Quote by Claude Monet.

Claude Monet Biography Summary:
The biography of the French impressionist artist shows us not just about his life as an artist, but also his life as a man, a husband and a father. His biography shows us his achievements and yet also his weaknesses. During his life, Claude Monet created over 2,500 pieces of artwork, but for many, his "Impression, Sunrise" painting was considered the most important. It was from this painting that the Impressionist movement gained its name and earnded Claude Monet the title as Father of the movement. In his biography we note that Claude Monet states that an "impression" is a special and limited form of sketch. We read early on in the Claude Monet Biography how he wanted to be an artist and was enrolled at the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Claude gained early recognition for his charcoal caricatures which he was able to sell. We see during the biography how artist Eugène Boudin became a mentor to the young Monet. The biography then takes us to Paris where Monet met other Impressionist artists.

Impression Sunrise By Claude Monet

Rouen Cathedral Paintings By Claude Monet

London Parliament Paintings By Claude Monet

The Artist's Garden at Giverny By Claude Monet

Giverny France

Impressionism Art

Claude Monet Water Lilies

Claude Monet Paintings

Books About Claude Monet

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The Biography of Claude Monet
This Website on Claude Monet was founded in 2008 as a tribute to the French artist.