OVERVIEW
Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet 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.
Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872
EARLY LIFE
1840-1845
Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 Rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubree Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On May 20, 1841, he was baptized into the local church parish, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
MIDDLE LIFE
1851-1883
STARTING IN THE ARTS
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. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois Orchard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/57, he met fellow artist Eugene Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.
During the early 1880s 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.
Young Claude
FAMILY LIFE
In 1878, the Monets temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hoschede, a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in Vetheuil during the summer. After her husband Ernest became bankrupt and left in 1878 for Belgium in September 1879 and while Monet continued to live in the house of Vetheuil, Alice Hoschede helped Monet raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six childre. They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques.
In the spring of 1880, Alice Hoschede and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vetheuil. 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 Hoschede married Claude Monet in 1892.
BEGINNING "WATER LILIES"
At the beginning of May 1883, 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 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 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, 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 Galerie 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.
Monet Painting in His Studio
Cataracts formed on Monet's eyes, for which he underwent two operations 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 he 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 he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.
END OF LIFE
1926
DEATH
Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus about fifty people attended the ceremony.