Born November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. Claude Monet was raised in Le Havre, where he developed a reputation as a caricature artist by the time he was 15. In 1858, the young artist met landscape painter Eugène Boudin, a mentor who first introduced him to outdoor painting. Monet was reluctant to leave the studio and the familiarity of indoor scenes, but plein air painting eventually became the basis for his life’s work.
Against his parents’ wishes, Claude Monet left home for Paris in 1859 to pursue a career in painting. There, he was inspired by the work of Eugène Delacroix, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. He studied at the free Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, and was a frequent patron of the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for fellow realist artists such as Gustave Courbet.
Claude Monet took a brief hiatus from his artistic pursuits to serve in the military in Algeria from 1860 to 1862. Upon his return to Paris, he picked up where he left off, studying art, experimenting with new styles, traveling, and forming important friendships with fellow painters, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Édouard Manet. He also worked in the forest at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean François Millet, as well as with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.
During the 1960s, Claude Monet was constantly traveling, having become captivated by natural light, atmosphere, and color. The artist continually sought to convey the remarkable variety and subtle particulars of each new landscape. Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867) exemplified this experimentation with its shimmering array of bright, natural colors, eschewing the somber browns and blacks of the earlier landscape tradition. Tragically, few of Monet's canvases from this early period survived. The artist was financially unstable and frequently destroyed his own paintings rather than have them seized by creditors.
In 1870, Claude Monet married his wife, Camille, and the two traveled to London and eventually settled at Argenteuil. His best-known, most popular works were produced during this time at Argenteuil, where he often painted alongside Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte, and Manet. Monet regularly exhibited his paintings in the private Impressionist group shows, which first took place in 1874. During that first show his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a hostile newspaper critic to call all the artists "Impressionists," a name that persists to characterize the artistic movement today.
Claude Monet's paintings from the 1870s, notably Red Boats at Argenteuil (1875), are fine examples of the new Impressionist style. The paintings are essentially illusionist, but ring with a chromatic vibrancy. Monet worked directly from nature and revealed that even on the darkest, gloomiest day, an infinite variety of colors exist. To capture the fleeting lights and hues, Monet had to employ a new painting technique using short brushstrokes filled with individual color. The result was a canvas alive with painterly activity, the opposite of the smooth blended surfaces of the past.
While traditional landscape artists painted what they saw in their mind, Claude Monet, sought to paint the world exactly how he saw it, not how he knew it should look. So rather than painting a myriad of separate leaves, he depicted splashes of constantly changing light and color. It’s important to note that in this aspect, Monet belongs to the tradition of Renaissance illusionism. In depicting the natural world, he based his art on perceptual rather than conceptual knowledge.
In 1883 Claude Monet moved to Giverny, and likewise most of his Impressionist colleagues left the security of the cohesive group to explore their own directions. While his home was in Giverny, he never ceased traveling—to London, Madrid, and Venice, as well as within his native country. Thanks to the art dealer Durand-Ruel, Monet gradually gained critical and financial success during the late 1880s and the 1890s. A lifelong supporter of Monet and his work, Durand-Ruel sponsored one-man exhibitions as early as 1883 and organized the first large-scale Impressionist group show in the United States.
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