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. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet (1800–1871) and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet (1805–1857), both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised in the local Paris church,
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. Although baptised Catholic, Monet later became an atheist. In 1845, his family moved to
Le Havre in
Normandy. His father, a
wholesale merchant, 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, he entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He was an apathetic student who, after showing skill in art from a young age, began drawing caricatures and portraits of acquaintances at age 15 for money. In around 1858, he met fellow artist
Eugène Boudin, who would encourage Monet to develop his techniques, teach him the "
en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting and take Monet on painting excursions. Monet thought of Boudin as his master, whom "he owed everything to" for his later success. In 1857, his mother died. He lived with his father and aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre; Lecadre would be a source of support for Monet in his early art career. He immediately visited the
Salon which had just opened. Then he was welcomed by
Armand Gautier, a friend of his aunt Jeanne Lecadre. The latter paid him a regular pension and managed his savings of around 2,000 francs which he had accumulated through the sale of his drawings. They would be precious to him because his father had applied for a grant from the city of Le Havre, on 6 August 1858, but he was refused. He also visited Charles Lhuillier, Charles Monginot and
Constant Troyon. The latter two advised him to enter the studio of
Thomas Couture, who was preparing for the
École des Beaux-Arts. However, the latter refused the young Monet. At the beginning of 1860, probably in February, he entered the
Académie Suisse, located on the Île de la Cité , which was directed by Charles Suisse. At the
Salon that year, he particularly admired the works of
Eugène Delacroix, the previous year it was
Charles-François Daubigny who had attracted his attention. This first stay was not, however, devoted only to work. Indeed, Claude spent a significant part of his time in Parisian cafés and more particularly at the Brasserie des Martyrs, then a popular meeting place for authors and artists. Certainly, his family could have paid the cost of 2,500 francs for a substitute, but while initially Monet claimed in 1900 that they required in return that he renounce his artistic career to take over the family business, by the 1920s he had changed this to him having to become a "selon la norme" (normal artist). The army records described him as being in good health, , with brown hair and chestnut eyes. He also told
Gustave Geffroy: "It did me the greatest good in every way and put some lead in my head. I thought only of painting, intoxicated as I was by this admirable country, and I now had the full approval of my family who saw me so full of ardor."
Return to Paris ,
Frédéric Bazille and Camille Doncieux, first wife of the artist,
Musée d'Orsay Monet returned to Paris in December 1862, where he enrolled in
Charles Gleyre studio, the École impériale des beaux-arts de Paris at 70 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs due to the recommendations of his cousin by marriage Auguste Toulmouche. There he immersed himself in his work, although a temporary problem with his eyesight, probably related to stress, prevented him from working in sunlight. With help from the art collector Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, he reunited with Camille and moved to
Étretat the following year. Monet would later be financially supported by the artist and art collector
Gustave Caillebotte, Bazille and perhaps
Gustave Courbet, although creditors still pursued him. During the war, he and his family lived in London and the Netherlands to avoid
conscription. Paintings such as
Gladioli marked what was likely the first time Monet had cultivated a garden for the purpose of his art. 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. The group, whose title was chosen to avoid association with any style or movement, were unified in their independence from the Salon and rejection of the prevailing
academicism. Monet gained a reputation as the foremost landscape painter of the group. The art critic
Louis Leroy wrote a hostile review. Taking particular notice of
Impression, Sunrise (1872), a hazy depiction of Le Havre port and stylistic detour, he coined the term "
Impressionism". Conservative critics and the public derided the group, with the term initially being ironic and denoting the painting as unfinished. The exhibition was open to anyone prepared to pay 60 francs and gave artists the opportunity to show their work without the interference of a jury. The paintings were well received by critics, who especially praised the way he captured the arrival and departures of the trains. File:Claude Monet - La Vague Verte.jpg|
The Green Wave, 1866,
Metropolitan Museum of Art File:Claude Monet 024.jpg|
Women in the Garden, 1866–1867,
Musée d'Orsay, Paris File:Claude Monet 022.jpg|
Woman in the Garden, 1867,
Hermitage, St. Petersburg; a study in the effect of sunlight and shadow on colour. File:Claude Monet - Jardin à Sainte-Adresse.jpg|
Garden at Sainte-Adresse ("Jardin à Sainte-Adresse"), 1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York File:Claude Monet - The Luncheon - Google Art Project.jpg|
The Luncheon, 1868,
Städel, which features Camille Doncieux and Jean Monet, was rejected by the Paris Salon of 1870 but included in the first Impressionists' exhibition in 1874. File:Claude Monet La Grenouillére.jpg|
La Grenouillére 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; a small plein-air painting created with broad strokes of intense colour. File:Claude Monet - On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt - 1922.427 - Art Institute of Chicago.jpg|
On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868,
Art Institute of Chicago File:Claude Monet - The Magpie - Google Art Project.jpg|
The Magpie, 1868–1869. Musée d'Orsay, Paris; one of Monet's early attempts at capturing the effect of snow on the landscape. See also
Snow at Argenteuil File:Claude Monet, 1870, Le port de Trouville (Breakwater at Trouville, Low Tide), oil on canvas, 54 x 65.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.jpg|
Le port de Trouville (Breakwater at Trouville, Low Tide), 1870,
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest File:Claude Monet 002.jpg|
La plage de Trouville, 1870,
National Gallery, London. The left figure may be Camille, on the right possibly the wife of
Eugène Boudin, whose beach scenes influenced Monet. File:Houses on the Achterzaan MET DT719.jpg|
Houses on the Achterzaan, 1871, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York File:Claude Monet - Jean Monet on his Hobby Horse.jpg|
Jean Monet On His Hobby Horse, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York File:Claude Monet - Springtime - Google Art Project.jpg|
Springtime 1872,
Walters Art Museum File:Ships Riding on the Seine at Rouen by Claude Monet, 1872.jpg|
Ships Riding on the Seine at Rouen, 1872,
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Death of Camille and Vétheuil , Paris In 1875, Monet returned to figure painting with
Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, after effectively abandoning it with
The Luncheon. His interest in the figure continued for the next four years—reaching its crest in 1877 and concluding altogether in 1890. Their second son,
Michel, was born in 1878, after which Camille's health deteriorated further. She died the next year.
John Berger describes the work as "a blizzard of white, grey, purplish paint ... a terrible blizzard of loss which will forever efface her features. In fact there can be very few death-bed paintings which have been so intensely felt or subjectively expressive." The stay in Poissy would not last very long. In December 1882 the Seine had overflowed its banks and there was a danger of flooding the Monet residence. On the way back, Monet and Renoir stopped briefly at l´Estaque, near Marseille, to visit Cézanne, before returning to Giverny late December. During this trip Monet discovered the small town of
Bordighera which he found particularly attractive: in a letter to Durand-Ruel on 12 January 1884, he described it as "one of the most beautiful places we saw on our trip". Earlier in 1883 the famous architect
Charles Garnier wrote a piece in a travel book called Artistic features of Bordighera. In the first chapter, he claims that "in truth, Bordighera is far less Italy than Palestine…" referring to the old town, the free growing palm trees and the exotic gardens. In his text Garnier recommends eight point of views which he finds most interesting for any artist to paint. Soon after his return to Giverny, Monet wrote to his art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel expressing his desire to go back to Italy and Bordighera for a longer stay. He put forward his desire to go on his own and asked Durand-Ruel not to mention his wish to anyone, especially not to Renoir. The unique light and luxuriant vegetation presented themselves as a completely new challenge. In a letter to Alice Horschedé, he wrote "These palm trees are exasperating, and also the motifs are extremely difficult to render, to put down on canvas, everything is so lush". During his stay in Bordighera, Monet went to nearby Dolceaqua where he painted the bridge which he called "a little gem of elegance". Some of the most notable compositions from his stay in Bordighera are
View of Bordighera,
Olive Trees,
Villas at Bordighera,
The Moreno Garden,
Valley of Sasso and
Dolceacqua. The Bordighera paintings are not so well known to the public as some of his work. One explanation presented is that following the Paris Stock market crash of 1882 Monet's art dealer Durand-Ruels suffered a severe financial loss and consequently, he had to pawn several of Monet's Bordighera paintings as soon as he had received them. Finally leaving Bordighera, Monet stopped in Menton to paint the Cap Martin and Monte Carlo before embarking on the 24 hour trip back to Giverny. Monet's struggles with creditors ended following his prosperous trips; to Bordighera in 1884, Two days after his arrival at Giverny Monet received the news that Édouard Manet had died. As he had no money for the train fare to the funeral nor mourning attire, he was forced to petition Durand-Ruel for the necessary money. The gardens were Monet's greatest source of inspiration for 40 years. Monet purchased additional land with a water meadow. In 1902, he increased the size of his
water garden by nearly 4000 square metres; the pond was enlarged in 1901 and 1910 with
easels installed all around to allow different perspectives to be captured. Monet chose the location in the hope of finding a "new aesthetic language that bypassed learned formulas, one that would be both true to nature and unique to him as an individual, not like anyone else." During his stays, he painted Waterloo Bridge early in the morning at sunrise, then Charing Cross Bridge in the afternoon. It was during his second stay that he began to paint the Houses of Parliament, from
St Thomas' Hospital in the late afternoon and at sunset. The paintings continued to be retouched in the studio until 1904. The series
Views of the Thames in London — 1900 to 1904 was exhibited in May and June 1904.
Water lilies In 1899, he began painting the water lilies that would occupy him continually for the next 20 years of his life, being his last and "most ambitious" sequence of paintings. He had exhibited this first group of pictures of the garden, devoted primarily to his Japanese bridge, in 1900. By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved "a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art".
Claude Roger-Marx noted in a review of Monet's successful 1909 exhibition of the first
Water Lilies series that he had "reached the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination joined to the real". The Monets stayed with Hunter for the last two weeks on her tenancy before the couple relocated to the Hotel Britannia, which was chosen for its views. Initially Monet only tentatively began painting images of the city but Alice was of the opinion expressed in a letter to Germaine, that Venice "is so beautiful and so created to tempt you, but who can render those marvelous effects. I see only my Monet who can do it." Their deaths left Monet depressed, as Blanche cared for him. In 1913, Monet travelled to London to consult the German ophthalmologist
Richard Liebreich. He was prescribed new glasses and rejected cataract surgery for the right eye. The next year, Monet, encouraged by Clemenceau, made plans to construct a new, large studio that he could use to create a "decorative cycle of paintings devoted to the water garden". He became deeply dedicated to the decorations of his garden during the war. File:Nymphéas reflets de saule 1916-19.jpg|
Water Lilies and Reflections of a Willow (1916–1919),
Musée Marmottan Monet File:Claude Monet, Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow.JPG|
Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow, 1916–1919, Sale Christie's New York, 1998 File:Claude Monet, Weeping Willow.JPG|
Weeping Willow, 1918,
Columbus Museum of Art File:Claude Monet Weeping Willow.jpg|
Weeping Willow, 1918–19,
Kimball Art Museum,
Fort Worth, Monet's
Weeping Willow paintings were an homage to the fallen French soldiers of World War I File:Monet - Das Haus in den Rosen.jpeg|
House Among the Roses, between 1917 and 1919,
Albertina, Vienna File:Monet- Der Rosenweg in Giverny.jpeg|
The Rose Walk, Giverny, 1920–1922,
Musée Marmottan Monet File:1920-22 Claude Monet The Japanese Footbridge MOMA NY anagoria.JPG|
The Japanese Footbridge, 1920–1922,
Museum of Modern Art File:Claude Monet - Wisteria - Google Art Project.jpg|
Wisteria, 1920–1925,
Kunstmuseum Den Haag ==Method==