Claude Monet
Claude Monet, born Oscar-Claude Monet, was a French artist who lived from 1840 to 1926. He is best known as the founder of the Impressionism art movement that swept through France and the entire art world during the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Monet was born in Paris, France to a grocer and singer. He knew from a very early age that he wanted to become an artist. His family moved to Le Havre in Normandy in the northwest part of France when he was four years old. At age 10, he attended the Le Havre secondary school of the arts and made some extra money selling charcoal portrait sketches. Monet received his first art lesson from Jacques-François Ochard, an artist who lived in the area. He soon befriended Eugène Boudin, another local artist, who was the first to teach Monet how to paint en plein air. After his mother died, Monet moved back to Paris to live with his aunt. He often visited the Louvre in Paris to sketch as did many other artists of the day, but instead of focusing on the statues, he sketched the views outside the windows.
In Paris, Monet befriended Édouard Manet, a fellow artist who became integral to the Impressionist art movement. In 1874, the first Impressionist art show was exhibited by a group of artists who had been rejected from the Paris Salon, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Cézanne. At the time, it wasn’t yet called “Impressionism”. The movement was inadvertently named by an art reviewer who titled his scathing review, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” after one of Monet’s paintings titled “Impression, Sunrise”.
Camille, Monet’s wife, died in 1879 from cancer, either uterine or pelvic, at the young age of 32. This affected him greatly. After the premature death of his wife, Monet painted with a new ambition, never wanting to be poor again. During this period, he produced some of his most well-known pieces. In 1892, he married Alice Hoschedé, who was the wife of his good friend, Ernest Hoschedé, who had just died in 1891.
Monet became highly successful in his life. Impressionism, which he helped found, soon became mainstream and lucrative and Monet was one of the forefront artists of the movement. In 1883, Monet first moved into what would be his famous house at Giverny, France, northwest of Paris. It was an old farmhouse. He immediately began to modify the landscape around his home to create his now famous gardens. The result is a sprawling and generous creation, more like an English garden with its rambling design and overabundance of flowers and plants.
When Monet had originally moved in, spruce and cypress trees lined the walkway. As he wanted his yard to be filled with flowers and sunlight, against his wife, Alice’s, wishes, he thinned out the trees to allow more sunlight to filter through to his flowers. Monet planted a variety of flowers in purposeful placements, so that one would begin to bloom when another had withered. He also carefully chose the colors of each flower type, planning areas of cool-colored flowers against areas of warm-colored flowers to match the rising and setting of the sun and what time of day the sun would reach the flowers.
In 1890, Monet was able to buy his house in Giverny outright. He immediately began more heavy remodeling of the landscape. In 1893, he bought the plot of land directly next to his home. He redirected a marshy stream to fill in a pond in this adjacent plot and built his now-famous Japanese-style bridge to expand over the stream. Wisteria generously hangs over the bridge, filling in the space with flowers and greenery. Interestingly for us today, Monet was at odds with the town, as he redirected the stream without any prior permission or understanding of how it would modify the natural waterways.
Monet remained in Giverny for the rest of his life. His backyard continually gave him inspiration for his art. Between 1899 and 1926, he created a large number of pieces based on his garden. In his later years, he suffered from progressively deteriorating eyesight, though he still continued to paint. Claude Monet died in 1926 at age 86 years old from lung cancer.
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