Oscar-Claude Monet (, ; ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which was exhibited in 1874 at the First Impressionist Exhibition, initiated by Monet and a number of like-minded artists as an alternative to the Salon.
Monet was raised in Le Havre, Normandy, and became interested in the outdoors and drawing from an early age. Although his mother, Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, supported his ambitions to be a painter, his father, Claude-Adolphe, disapproved and wanted him to pursue a career in business. He was very close to his mother, but she died in January 1857 when he was sixteen years old, and he was sent to live with his childless, widowed but wealthy aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. He went on to study at the Académie Suisse, and under the academic history painter Charles Gleyre, where he was a classmate of Auguste Renoir. His early works include landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, but attracted little attention. A key early influence was Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to the concept of plein air painting. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, also in northern France, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond.
Monet's ambition to document the French countryside led to a method of painting the same scene many times so as to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. Among the best-known examples are his series of haystacks (1890–1891), paintings of Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894), and the paintings of water lilies in his garden in Giverny, which occupied him for the last 20 years of his life. Frequently exhibited and successful during his lifetime, Monet's fame and popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century when he became one of the world's most famous painters and a source of inspiration for a burgeoning group of artists.
Biography
Birth and childhood Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840, on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet (1800–1871) and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet (1805–1857), both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised in the local Paris church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar.Patin, Sylvie. "Monet: un œil... mais, bon Dieu, quel œil!" Découvertes Gallimard, Number 131, série Arts. p. 14 Although baptised Catholic, Monet later became an atheist. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father, a wholesale merchant, wanted him to go into the family's ship-chandling and grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer, and supported Monet's desire for a career in art.
On 1 April 1851, he entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He was an apathetic student who, after showing skill in art from a young age, began drawing caricatures and portraits of acquaintances at age 15 for money. He began his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. In around 1858, he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who encouraged Monet to develop his technique, taught him the "en plein air" (outdoor) approach and took him on painting excursions. Monet thought of Boudin as his master, whom "he owed everything to" for his later success. In 1857, his mother died. He lived with his father and aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre; Lecadre would be a source of support for Monet in his early art career.
First stay in Paris (1859-1860)
Claude Monet arrived in Paris in April 1859 and settled into the Hôtel du Nouveau Monde, Place du Havre. He immediately visited the Salon which had just opened. Then he was welcomed by Armand Gautier, a friend of his aunt Jeanne Lecadre. The latter paid him a regular pension and managed his savings of around 2,000 francs which he had accumulated through the sale of his drawings. They would be precious to him because his father had applied for a grant from the city of Le Havre, on 6 August 1858, but he was refused. He also visited Charles Lhuillier, Charles Monginot and Constant Troyon. The latter two advised him to enter the studio of Thomas Couture, who was preparing for the École des Beaux-Arts. However, the latter refused the young Monet. At the beginning of 1860, probably in February, he entered the Académie Suisse, located on the Île de la Cité, which was directed by Charles Suisse. There he met Camille Pissarro in particular. At the Salon that year, he particularly admired the works of Eugène Delacroix, the previous year it was Charles-François Daubigny who had attracted his attention. This first stay was not, however, devoted only to work. Indeed, Claude spent a significant part of his time in Parisian cafés and more particularly at the Brasserie des Martyrs, then a popular meeting place for authors and artists.
On 2 March 1861, the 20-year-old Monet was drawn at Le Havre to be conscripted into the army. Certainly, his family could have paid the cost of 2,500 francs for a substitute, but while initially Monet claimed in 1900 that they required in return that he renounce his artistic career to take over the family business, by the 1920s he had changed this to him having to become a "selon la norme" (normal artist). Monet refused and so enlisted for seven years with the 1st Regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique on 29 April 1861. The army records described him as being in good health, , with brown hair and chestnut eyes. In June 1861, he crossed Algeria to join his regiment in Mustapha. Prior to this he had never been further from Normandy than Paris and had never ridden a horse. In the spring of 1862, he contracted typhoid fever and was allowed to return to Le Havre during the summer to recuperate with his aunt, Jeanne Lecadre in Sainte-Adresse, Normandy. While there he met Eugène Boudin again. His aunt agreed to discharge him from the army and pay the 3,025 francs.
While painting during the summer of 1862, near Cap de la Héve he was introduced to and became friends with the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, who together with Boudin was an important mentor to Monet. He received his good conduct discharge on 21 November 1862. Despite the experiences that Monet had in Algeria, which may have seemed unpleasant, he generally remembered it well. His time in Algeria had a powerful effect on Monet, who later said that the light and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the gem of my future researches". He also told Gustave Geffroy: "It did me the greatest good in every way and put some lead in my head. I thought only of painting, intoxicated as I was by this admirable country, and I now had the full approval of my family who saw me so full of ardor.". Originally published in 1920. This edition presented and annotated by C. Judrin.
Return to Paris
Monet returned to Paris in December 1862, where he enrolled in Charles Gleyre studio, the École impériale des beaux-arts de Paris at 70 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs due to the recommendations of his cousin by marriage Auguste Toulmouche. However he ended up leaving Gleyre's studio, as they disagreed on the method of presenting nature. While here he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille. Bazille eventually became his closest friend. In search of motifs, they travelled to Honfleur where Monet painted several "studies" of the harbour and the mouth of the Seine. Monet often painted alongside Renoir and Alfred Sisley, both of whom shared his desire to articulate new standards of beauty in conventional subjects.
During this time he painted Women in Garden, his first successful large-scale painting, and , the "most important painting of Monet's early period". Having debuted at the Salon in 1865 with La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide and Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur to large praise, he hoped would help him break through into the Salon of 1866. He could not finish it in a timely manner and instead submitted The Woman in the Green Dress and Pavé de Chailly to acceptance. Thereafter, he submitted works to the Salon annually until 1870, but they were accepted by the juries only twice, in 1866 and 1868. He sent no more works to the Salon until his single, final attempt in 1880. His work was considered radical, "discouraged at all official levels".
In 1867 his then-mistress, Camille Doncieux—whom he had met two years earlier as a model for his paintings—gave birth to their first child, Jean. Monet had a strong relationship with Jean, claiming that Camille was his lawful wife so Jean would be considered legitimate. Monet's father stopped financially supporting him as a result of the relationship. Earlier in the year Monet had been forced to move to his aunt's house in Sainte-Adresse. There he immersed himself in his work, although a temporary problem with his eyesight, probably related to stress, prevented him from working in sunlight. Monet loved his family dearly, painting many portraits of them such as Child With a Cup, a Portrait of Jean Monet. This painting in particular shows the first signs of Monets' later famous impressionistic work.
With help from the art collector Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, he reunited with Camille and moved to Étretat the following year. Around this time, he was trying to establish himself as a figure painter who depicted the "explicitly contemporary, bourgeois", an intention that continued into the 1870s. He did evolve his painting technique and integrate stylistic experimentation in his plein-air style—as evidenced by The Beach at Sainte-Adresse and On the Bank of the Seine respectively, the former being his "first sustained campaign of painting that involved tourism".
Several of his paintings had been purchased by Gaudibert, who commissioned a painting of his wife, alongside other projects; the Gaudiberts were for two years "the most supportive of Monet's hometown patrons". Monet would later be financially supported by the artist and art collector Gustave Caillebotte, Bazille and perhaps Gustave Courbet, although creditors still pursued him.
Exile and Argenteuil
He married Camille on 28 June 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. During the war, he and his family lived in London and the Netherlands to avoid conscription. Monet and Charles-François Daubigny lived in self-imposed exile. While living in London, Monet met his old friend Pissarro and the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and befriended his first and primary art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, an encounter that would be decisive for his career. There he saw and admired the works of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner and was impressed by Turner's treatment of light, especially in the works depicting the fog on the Thames. He repeatedly painted the Thames, Hyde Park and Green Park. In the spring of 1871, his works were refused authorisation for inclusion in the Royal Academy exhibition and police suspected him of revolutionary activities.The texts of seven police reports, written on 2 June – 9 October 1871 are included in Monet in Holland, the catalog of an exhibition in the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum (1986). That same year he learned of his father's death.