Claude Monet

Claude Monet 1840–1926
Parisian by birth, Monet was still a child when his family moved to Le Havre. There he later met Boudin, who convinced him to become a landscape painter. His artistic studies were interrupted by two years of military service in Algeria, but in 1862 he returned to Paris and worked briefly in Gleyre’s studio, where he met Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley. He showed in the Salons of 1865 and 1866. In 1870, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he went to England. Monet's Impression — Sunrise was greeted with derision at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and its title would be adopted mockingly to name the whole movement of Impressionism. Although extremely poor for many years, the artist gradually won recognition, comfort, and fame. He painted along the Seine, on the Riviera, by the English Channel, in Brittany, the Midi, Holland, London, and Venice, and, especially in his last years, in his own elaborate garden at Giverny. Monet died at Giverny.