Claude Monet Impressionist artist

Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. There, in his teens, he showed a talent for drawing caricatures, and in about 1858 he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who encouraged him to paint out of doors rather than in the studio. In 1859, Monet committed himself to a career as an artist, and moved to Paris. During the 1860s he was associated with Édouard Manet, and with other aspiring French painters destined to form the Impressionist school—notably Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir,  Alfred Sisley,  Berthe Morisot Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas    

Working in the open air, Monet painted simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and he began to have some success at official exhibitions. As his style developed, however, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the interest of direct artistic expression. His experiments in rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketch-like application of bright colour became more and more daring, and he appeared deliberately to turn away from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter enjoying the support of the art establishment.

In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to appeal directly to the public by organizing their own exhibition. The press derisively labeled them "Impressionists" because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's paintings at the exhibition bore the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from this time were extremely loosely structured, and the colour was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and colour possible.

By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the Impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his colour and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden (now open to the public)—a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo. Paintings of the pond and the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life. Throughout these years he also worked on his other celebrated "series" paintings, groups of works representing the same subject—haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the River Seine, Houses of Parliament—seen in varying light, at different times of the day or seasons of the year. Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny.