Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris, he was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet. 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.

On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of arts where he soon became known for his charcoal caricatures. Later in the 1950s, on the beaches of Normandy he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet outdoor techniques for painting.

On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at universities, in 1862 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 in open air with broken colour and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism. It was during his time in Paris that Monet met many painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 19, 1870), Monet took refuge in England. 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 colour. In 1871 he left London to live in Zaandam and later that year he returned to France. In France, Monet lived in Argenteuil, a small village on the Seine near Paris, from the end of 1871 to 1878, where he painted some of his best known works.

In the early 1870s Monet painted Impression, Sunrise 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 despite its derogatory intentions, was soon appropriated by the Impressionists as a term for themselves.

During the early 1880's Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. In the 1880s and 1890s he worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series were 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 series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, mornings on the Seine, and the water-lilies on his property at Giverny.

Between 1883 and 1908, Monet travelled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes. He painted an important series of paintings in Venice, and in London he painted views of Parliament and of Charing Cross Bridge.

In the early 1920s Monet developed cataracts on both his eyes. The paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. After several operations he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.

Monet died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. He is remembered as the 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 in open air landscape painting.

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