Claude Monet was Born: 1840, November 14, Paris, France. In 1858, Monet meets Eugène Boudin who encourages Claude to paint out of doors. In 1859 Monet enters the Swiss Academy. In 1865 Claude Monets 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.

Claude Monet: Life and Art

Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 - December 5, 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. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Claude Monet was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On May 20, 1841, Claude Monet was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted Claude Monet to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Claude Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 Claude Monet met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting. On 28 January 1857 his mother died. Claude Monet was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

Claude Monet, 1840-1926

When Claude Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Claude Monet, having brought his paints and other tools with him, would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Claude Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet. In June of 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment, but upon his contracting typhoid his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at a university. 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 universities, in 1862 Claude Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric 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. Claude Monet's Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition, and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Women in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868. Shortly thereafter Doncieux became pregnant and bore their first child, Jean. In 1868, due to financial reasons, Claude Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine.

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 19, 1870), Monet took refuge in England in September 1870. While there, 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 to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition. 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.

Monet's Passion: Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter's Gardens

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 he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His 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 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 Monet still living in the house in Vétheuil. In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny. In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he 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. He 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. He 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 he 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.

Monet's Years at Giverny (Abradale Books)

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 Fondation 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.

Claude Monet Posters


Water Lilies Morning Art Print
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Claude Monet Water Lilies

Claude Monet Paintings