Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Monet, Claude was French painter, leader, initiator,and direct advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his dedication to the morals of the movement was unwavering all through his long profession, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.

His childhood was spent in Le Havre, where he first started as a caricaturist but was then transformed to landscape painting by his early teacher Boudin, from whom he reclaimed his firm predilection for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a companionship with Pissarro. After completing two years' military service in Algiers, he came back to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye'. He then, in 1862, joined the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there he met Bazille, Sisley, and Renoir, with whom he was to form the matter of the Impressionist group. Monet's dedication to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most aspiring early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The painting is about 2.5 meters high and to implement him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he needed. Courbet visited him when he was working on canvas and he said that Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were accurate.

In Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) Claude took refuge in England with Pissarro: he examined the style of Constable and Turner,

In 1878 he went to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris. From 1890 he focussed on series of paintings in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in variant lights---Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the well known. He continued to travel, visiting London and Venice several times .

At the end of his life he was distraught by failing eyesight, but he painted until the end. He was extremely prolific and many big galleries have examples of his work.