Claude Monet
The leader of Impressionism.
Monet painted outdoors to capture the light of a single moment and painted the same motif in different lights: haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the water lilies at Giverny.
Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris but grew up in the port of Le Havre in Normandy. As a teenager he drew caricatures of the town’s bourgeoisie and sold them. The landscape painter Eugène Boudin taught him to paint outdoors, which decided his path. In Paris he studied in Charles Gleyre’s studio and became friends with Renoir, Sisley and Bazille.
During the 1860s he often lived in poverty. His model and companion was Camille Doncieux, who gave birth to their son Jean in 1867. They married in 1870. During the Franco-Prussian War Monet fled to London, where he saw Turner’s work. Afterwards the family settled in Argenteuil on the Seine. The painting Impression, Sunrise (1872), a misty view of the harbour at Le Havre, was shown at the first group exhibition in 1874. A critic mocked the title, and so Impressionism got its name. The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.
Monet wanted to capture the light and atmosphere of a moment. He painted with short, rapid brushstrokes and pure, bright colours, and avoided black. Shadows became blue and violet. From the 1890s he painted series of the same motif at different times of day and year: haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament in London. He wanted to show how light changes everything.
Camille died in 1879. Monet made a family with Alice Hoschedé, whom he married in 1892. In 1883 they moved to Giverny in Normandy. There he laid out a large garden with a pond full of water lilies and a Japanese bridge. During his last thirty years he painted almost nothing but the garden. He developed cataracts and had surgery in 1923. After the First World War he donated a series of enormous water-lily paintings to the French state. They were installed in two oval rooms in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1927, the year after his death.
Monet died in 1926. He is the best-known name in Impressionism. After the Second World War the large water-lily paintings, in which forms dissolve into colour, inspired the American Abstract Expressionists. His house and garden at Giverny are now a much-visited museum.