Claude Monet
Oscar Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Oscar Claude Monet
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Claude Monet was in almost every sense the founder of French Impressionist painting, the term itself coming from one of his paintings, Impression, Sunrise. As a child, his father wanted him to go into the grocery business, but his heart was in the profession of artistry, and at age 11, he entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. During his stay at the secondary school, he was known for the caricatures he would draw for the locals for ten to twenty francs each. Five years later, he met artist Eugene Bouldin, who taught him the techniques of “en plein air” painting and became his mentor. At the age of 16, Monet left school for Paris, where instead of studying the great artworks of the masters, he sat by the window and painted what he saw outside.
When he was twenty-one years old, he joined the First Regiment of African Light Calvary in Algeria, for a seven year tour. But his stay was cut short after two years when he was hit by a bout of typhoid fever, and his aunt arranged for his release, as long as he continued his art studies. Upon his return to Paris, he studied the “en plein air” methods, along with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, and developed the painting style that would soon be known as Impressionism. Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Monet fled to England, also traveling to the Netherlands before his return to Paris, after which he exhibited many of his works in 1874, at the first Impressionist Exhibition.
Upon the death of his wife Camille to tuberculosis after the birth of their second child, Monet was resolved never to life in poverty again, and was determined to create some of the best artworks of the 19th century. By 1890, he was prosperous to buy a large house and garden, where he would continue to paint for the rest of his life.
As a painter of controlled nature, Monet’s garden was one of his biggest sources of inspiration. As such, he wrote precise instructions for his gardeners, with specific designs and color layouts, and amassed a large collection of botanical books. At one time, he employed seven gardeners at once. After his death of lung cancer, his only surviving child, Michel, was heir to the Monet family property, which has since been restored and opened to the public, including the vast gardens.
Oscar-Claude Monet (/moʊˈneɪ/; French: [klod mɔnɛ]; 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. 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.
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée 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. (He signed his juvenilia «O. Monet».) Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet later became an atheist.
In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family’s ship-chandling and grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer, and supported Monet’s desire for a career in art.
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-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he 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. 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.
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. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other young painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists.
After drawing a low ballot number in March 1861, Monet was drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry (Chasseurs d’Afrique) in Algeria for a seven-year period of military service. His prosperous father could have purchased Monet’s exemption from conscription but declined to do so when his son refused to give up painting. While in Algeria Monet did only a few sketches of casbah scenes, a single landscape, and several portraits of officers, all of which have been lost. In a Le Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light and vivid colours of North Africa «contained the germ of my future researches». After about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and briefly went absent without leave. Following convalescence, Monet’s aunt intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete a 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.
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Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a French painter and one of the leading artists of the impressionist period. His paintings became famous around the world.
Monet was born in 1840 is Paris. His father had a shipping company while his mother cared for the family. At the age of five Monet and his family moved to Le Havre, where he went to school. His talent for drawing came out at an early age because the boy always liked to be outside.
In 1859 Monet went back to Paris to study art. There he met other artists of the time, including Renoir and Sisley. Together with them he started experimenting with painting in nature.
By the middle of the 1860s Monet was famous throughout the European art world. However his life started to change. He spent too much money and sank deeper into debt. В In 1870 Claude Monet married his long-time mistress Camille, with whom he had a son, Jean. His wife died after becoming seriously ill in 1879.
In 1874 Monet and some of his fellow artists decided to show their paintings in an exhibition. Critics started to call them impressionists, named after Monet’s painting “Impression:Sunrise”. Many people visited the exhibition but the group did not sell any paintings.
In the 1880s and 90s Monet became famous in the United States and made money from selling paintings. In 1892 he married a second time. In his later life Monet travelled to London and Venice where he painted a series of landscapes.В He died in 1926 in Giverney, France at the age of 86.
Monet’s style of impressionism was all about nature. In his works he tried to capture nature as it appeared to him at the moment. He also experimented with light and shadow and how they changed during different times of the day. В Some artists of the time criticised Monet and his style because they lacked detail and did resemble finished paintings.
Monet used strong colours, which he did not mix. He painted them onto the canvas in short brush strokes. He was also criticized for abandoning classical painting techniques.
In his later life he became fascinated with garden scenes. In Giverney he created a series of paintings called Water Lilies, impressions from a pond in his own garden.
Claude Monet Biography
Introduction
Impressionist forerunner Claude Monet had a long and illustrious artistic career, which spanned over two centuries. The Paris-born artist married twice, lived through two wars, lost two wives and painted from as far as London to the Mediterranean. Most importantly however, Monet was considered the leader of one of the most vibrantly different influential artistic movements after Realism.
Claude Monet Early Years
Monet fought his father’s desire for him to become a grocer. The family owned a grocery business but Monet was sure from a young age that his future lay in art.
Claude Monet, or Oscar Monet as he was christened, was born on the 14th November 1840 in Paris. Monet was to spend many of his formative years in Le Havre in Normandy, however, as his parents moved there when he was five.
It was in Le Havre that Monet’s ambition to become an artist was encouraged by an educational institution. A young Monet attended Le Havre secondary school of the arts where he made a name for himself selling charcoal caricatures. His love of art and determination to be an artist was compounded by his continued schooling by renowned names in art history; he took lessons from Jacques-Francois Ochard, who himself was a student of Jacques-Louis David, and also studied under the tutelage of Eugéne Boudin, who introduced him to painting with oil paints and shared with him his style of «en plein air» or outside style of painting.
Upon his return to Paris some years later, Monet was exposed to the old masters in the Louvre and would make the acquaintance of other influential Impressionist painters, such as Edouard Manet.
As Monet approached maturity as an artist his style began to diverge in a direction previously unseen. He preferred to paint outside and went against a variety of artistic traditions in pursuit of an artistic form that he felt comfortable with. Such a pursuit led him towards experimentation with color and light. Through his artistic portrayals Monet was attempting to depict outdoor sunlight with sketch-like precision.
Claude Monet Middle Years
In response to Impression, Sunrise art critic Louise Leroy said that the work seemed unfinished and like an «impression». The comment, which was intended to disparage was used by the Impressionist as a name for their movement.
After a brief career in the army, Monet returned to Paris disillusioned with the direction of art being taught. He studied for a brief time under the watchful gaze of Charles Gleyre, where he met like-minded artists, including Auguste Renoir. The beginnings of the Impressionism circle formed in Paris, with the artistic principle of painting the effects of outdoor light with rapid brush strokes and broken color.
Monet’s focus brought with it his first taste of artistic recognition as he went on to paint his future wife, Camille Doncieux. The pair would later welcome their first son, Jean and later married. Monet and his family relocated to London for a while due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and it was here that he witnessed the landscape work of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Monet and his family moved around substantially after London, staying in Zaandam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Monet also moved to the village of Argenteuil in France for a brief time. In 1872 he settled back in France and painted perhaps one of his first true Impressionist paintings, Impression, Sunrise. This work was the centrepiece of the first Impressionist exhibition in Musée Marmottan Monet, in Paris.
Shortly after the birth of their second son, Monet lost his first wife Camille to tuberculosis in 1879. A dedicated painter, Monet sought to paint his ailing wife on her death bed. Resolved by his loss, Monet painted a series of land and seascape paintings.
For Monet, this marked a transitional period where he no longer seemed interested in incorporating human figures into his work. In 1880 Monet remarried Vétheuil local Alice Hoschedé and he and his ever growing family moved once more. His move to Giverny was perhaps one of the most influential in his illustrious painting career.
Claude Monet Advanced Years
Further Exploration in Light and Color
Before settling to dedicate the rest of his professional career to painting scenes from his property in Giverny, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean. Here he relished the opportunity to fully explore his love of natural lighted scenes.
Now considered one of the foremost authorities and leader of the impressionist movement, Monet made an important move to a house in Giverny, Upper Normandy. There he began painting his now famous water garden and the inspiration for perhaps one of his most renowned works.
Monet’s aim was to paint a series of paintings depicting various natural scenes in different light conditions. The first of these was a series of paintings of Haystacks from different angles and at different times of day. Monet went on to paint, Rouen Cathedral, Poplars and Water Lilies. These and many other paintings painted on Monet’s property were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel.
The artist’s ailing health and increasingly bad eyesight were evident in his work. He began to suffer from cataracts and 1923 had two operations to remove them. Before then, however, his work in response to the First World War including a series of Weeping Willow trees has a reddish tone not uncommon to that of cataract sufferers.
After the operations, Monet altered some of his water lilies painting. Many believe this is a direct reflection of his changing vision, which was said to have been capable of perceiving ultraviolet wavelengths of light that eyes can normally not see.
Monet died of lung cancer on December 5 th 1926 at the age of 86. His final resting place is the Giverny church cemetery.
Claude Monet
Claude Monet Biography
How do artists represent and reflect the world they live in? The fact that the natural world is constantly changing makes depicting it a challenge when it comes to oil paintings, which are static and cannot show motion like movies do. To address this issue, the painter Claude Monet became one of the founders of the Impressionism art movement. Impressionism broke from convention and showed artists a new way to develop techniques to get to the heart of the reality in front of them.
Claude Monet was born in Paris, France on November 14, 1840. He began drawing as a boy when his family moved to Normandy. After becoming known for making caricatures of his teachers and people living in town, Monet met landscape artist Eugene Bodin, who taught him how to paint outside.
This led to Monet moving back to Paris, where he became a student at the Academie Suisse. Here, he immersed himself in the Barbizon school, which emphasized making preliminary sketches outside and then bringing the canvas back indoors to paint the natural world in a controlled environment.
Monet wasn’t satisfied with this approach and began to paint outside, remaining on the scene from the beginning until the end instead of finishing the work inside of a studio. He was beginning to focus on capturing the evanescence of shifting, natural light, which required faster painting and a new attitude about art. Impressionism actually became possible thanks to manufacturers producing new ranges of paint color in tubes that were easy to transport and use outside rather than having to rely on a studio to mix and store the hues.
Impressionism
The term «Impressionism» now refers to a major art movement, but it was originally applied by critics of Monet to express derision for his painting style. Monet exhibited his painting Impression: Sunrise in 1874 with a group of fellow artists who were using the new techniques of painting quickly with vibrant colors and completing the work outside instead of interrupting the process and finishing the paintings in a building. Critics said these works were «mere impressions» and showed that the artists were poorly trained and unable to finish paintings according to contemporary ideas of composition.
Monet and his fellow Impressionists were keen to eliminate the color black from their palettes and encouraged this practice at every opportunity. It brought about a new color theory, which emphasized the presence of color, within shadows, and they worked to the rule that there was no black in nature, and therefore, it should not be included in their paintings. Monet is widely regarded as the forerunner of French Impressionism.
Key elements of impressionism include quick dabs of paint made with broken, hurried brushstrokes as the artist seeks to lay down in paint what the world looks like at that unique moment. Artists practicing Impressionism would load their paintbrushes instead of using thin amounts of color to represent shadows. These shadows were not depicted as strictly black or gray, but had elements of other colors because that is the reality the artists were facing.
Major Paintings
Fascinated by the effects of light, he made innovative use of color and brshstrokes to portray a fresh and original vision. His tireless investigation of light on a given subject is charted throughout his series paintings, most notably on those of Rouen Cathedral and Water Lilies in his Giverny Garden.
Along with the other Impressionists, Monet’s aim in his painting was to capture reality and analyse the ever-changing nature of light and color. He recorded his surroundings faithfully, from the grime of a Paris railway station to the incandescent beauty of his later paintings based on the gardens he created at Giverny in northeastern France.
Influences
Paul Cezanne
Edgar Degas
Vincent van Gogh
Another seminal artist who was influenced by Monet, van Gogh (1853-1890) employed unusual color schemes to the point of symbolism to get across his own emotions in oil paintings. With van Gogh, viewers get much more of an impression of the scene than how it technically appears. The artist’s emotions and psychological state are revealed as well in his bold flurry of colors.
Monet died on December 5, 1926 in Giverny, France, leaving behind a substantial body of work that art aficionados still marvel at today. Shortly after Monet died, the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.
It’s worth noting that later in his life, Monet wrote:
My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions before the most fleeting moments. «
Claude Monet
Who Was Claude Monet?
Claude Monet was born in 1840 in France and enrolled in the Academie Suisse. After an art exhibition in 1874, a critic insultingly dubbed Monet’s painting style «Impression,» since it was more concerned with form and light than realism, and the term stuck. Monet struggled with depression, poverty and illness throughout his life. He died in 1926.
Early Life and Career
One of the most famous painters in the history of art and a leading figure in the Impressionist movement, whose works can be seen in museums around the world, Oscar Claude Monet (some sources say Claude Oscar) was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. Monet’s father, Adolphe, worked in his family’s shipping business, while his mother, Louise, took care of the family. A trained singer, Louise liked poetry and was a popular hostess.
In 1845, at the age of 5, Monet moved with his family to Le Havre, a port town in the Normandy region. He grew up there with his older brother, Leon. While he was reportedly a decent student, Monet did not like being confined to a classroom. He was more interested in being outside. At an early age, Monet developed a love of drawing. He filled his schoolbooks with sketches of people, including caricatures of his teachers. While his mother supported his artistic efforts, Monet’s father wanted him to go into business. Monet suffered greatly after the death of his mother in 1857.
In the community, Monet became well-known for his caricatures and for drawing many of the town’s residents. After meeting Eugene Boudin, a local landscape artist, Monet started to explore the natural world in his work. Boudin introduced him to painting outdoors, or plein air painting, which would later become the cornerstone of Monet’s work.
In 1859, Monet decided to move to Paris to pursue his art. There, he was strongly influenced by the paintings of the Barbizon school and enrolled as a student at the Academie Suisse. During this time, Monet met fellow artist Camille Pissarro, who would become a close friend for many years.
From 1861 to 1862, Monet served in the military and was stationed in Algiers, Algeria, but he was discharged for health reasons. Returning to Paris, Monet studied with Charles Gleyre. Through Gleyre, Monet met several other artists, including Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille; the four of them became friends. He also received advice and support from Johann Barthold Jongkind, a landscape painter who proved to be an important influence to the young artist.
Monet liked to work outdoors and was sometimes accompanied by Renoir, Sisley and Bazille on these painting sojourns. Monet won acceptance to the Salon of 1865, an annual juried art show in Paris; the show chose two of his paintings, which were marine landscapes. Though Monet’s works received some critical praise, he still struggled financially.
The following year, Monet was selected again to participate in the Salon. This time, the show officials chose a landscape and a portrait Camille (or also called Woman in Green), which featured his lover and future wife, Camille Doncieux. Doncieux came from a humble background and was substantially younger than Monet. She served as a muse for him, sitting for numerous paintings during her lifetime. The couple experienced great hardship around the birth of their first son, Jean, in 1867. Monet was in dire financial straits, and his father was unwilling to help them. Monet became so despondent over the situation that, in 1868, he attempted suicide by trying to drown himself in the Seine River.
Fortunately, Monet and Camille soon caught a break: Louis-Joachim Guadibert became a patron of Monet’s work, which enabled the artist to continue his work and care for his family. Monet and Camille married in June 1870, and following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the couple fled with their son to London, England. There, Monet met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his first art dealer.
Returning to France after the war, in 1872, Monet eventually settled in Argenteuil, an industrial town west of Paris, and began to develop his own technique. During his time in Argenteuil, Monet visited with many of his artist friends, including Renoir, Pissarro and Edouard Manet—who, according to Monet in a later interview, at first hated him because people confused their names. Banding together with several other artists, Monet helped form the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, as an alternative to the Salon and exhibited their works together.
Monet sometimes got frustrated with his work. According to some reports, he destroyed a number of paintings—estimates range as high as 500 works. Monet would simply burn, cut or kick the offending piece. In addition to these outbursts, he was known to suffer from bouts of depression and self-doubt.
The Master of Light and Color: «Impression, Sunrise»
The society’s April 1874 exhibition proved to be revolutionary. One of Monet’s most noted works in the show, «Impression, Sunrise» (1873), depicted Le Havre’s harbor in a morning fog. Critics used the title to name the distinct group of artists «Impressionists,» saying that their work seemed more like sketches than finished paintings.
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While it was meant to be derogatory, the term seemed fitting. Monet sought to capture the essence of the natural world using strong colors and bold, short brushstrokes; he and his contemporaries were turning away from the blended colors and evenness of classical art. Monet also brought elements of industry into his landscapes, moving the form forward and making it more contemporary. Monet began to exhibit with the Impressionists after their first show in 1874, and continued into the 1880s.
Monet’s personal life was marked by hardship around this time. His wife became ill during her second pregnancy (their second son, Michel, was born in 1878), and she continued to deteriorate. Monet painted a portrait of her on her death bed. Before her passing, the Monets went to live with Ernest and Alice Hoschede and their six children.
After Camille’s death, Monet painted a grim set of paintings known as the Ice Drift series. He grew closer to Alice, and the two eventually became romantically involved. Ernest spent much of his time in Paris, and he and Alice never divorced. Monet and Alice moved with their respective children in 1883 to Giverny, a place that would serve as a source of great inspiration for the artist and prove to be his final home. After Ernest’s death, Monet and Alice married in 1892.
Monet gained financial and critical success during the late 1880s and 1890s, and started the serial paintings for which he would become well-known. In Giverny, he loved to paint outdoors in the gardens that he helped create there. The water lilies found in the pond had a particular appeal for him, and he painted several series of them throughout the rest of his life; the Japanese-style bridge over the pond became the subject of several works, as well. (In 1918, Monet would donate 12 of his waterlily paintings to the nation of France to celebrate the Armistice.)
Sometimes Monet traveled to find other sources of inspiration. In the early 1890s, he rented a room across from the Rouen Cathedral, in northwestern France, and painted a series of works focused on the structure. Different paintings showed the building in morning light, midday, gray weather and more; this repetition was a result of Monet’s deep fascination with the effects of light.
Besides the cathedral, Monet painted several things repeatedly, trying to convey the sensation of a certain time of day on a landscape or a place. He also focused the changes that light made on the forms of haystacks and poplar trees in two different painting series around this time. In 1900, Monet traveled to London, where the Thames River captured his artistic attention.
In 1911, Monet became depressed after the death of his beloved Alice. In 1912, he developed cataracts in his right eye. In the art world, Monet was out of step with the avant-garde. The Impressionists were in some ways being supplanted by the Cubist movement, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
But there was still a great deal of interest in Monet’s work. During this period, Monet began a final series of 12 waterlily paintings commissioned by the Orangerie des Tuileries, a museum in Paris. He chose to make them on a very large scale, designed to fill the walls of a special space for the canvases in the museum; he wanted the works to serve as a «haven of peaceful meditation,» believing that the images would soothe the «overworked nerves» of visitors.
His Orangerie des Tuileries project consumed much of Monet’s later years. In writing to a friend, Monet stated, «These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me. It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel.» Monet’s health proved to be an obstacle, as well. Nearly blind, with both of his eyes now seriously affected by cataracts, Monet finally consented to undergo surgery for the ailment in 1923.
Later Years and Death
As he experienced in other points in his life, Monet struggled with depression in his later years. He wrote to one friend that «Age and chagrin have worn me out. My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.» Despite his feelings of despair, he continued working on his paintings until his final days.
Monet died on December 5, 1926, at his home in Giverny. Monet once wrote, «My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.» Most art historians believe that Monet accomplished much more than this: He helped change the world of painting by shaking off the conventions of the past. By dissolving forms in his works, Monet opened the door for further abstraction in art, and he is credited with influencing such later artists as Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.
Since 1980, Monet’s Giverny home has housed the Claude Monet Foundation.
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