Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians.
On the first of April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. On 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
In June 1861, Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year commitment, but, two years later, after he had contracted typhoid fever, his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at an art school. It is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
In 1872, he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. From the painting’s title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term “Impressionism”, which he intended as disparagement but which the Impressionists appropriated for themselves.
Self-portrait, 1886
Oil on canvas,
Private collection, Paris, France ▼
La rue de la Bavolle in Honfleur, 1864
Oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA ▼
Woman in the Garden (Saint-Adresse), 1867
Oil on canvas,
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia ▼
Terrace at Saint-Adresse, 1867
Oil on canvas,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA ▼
The Cart. Snow-Covered Road at Honfieur, with Saint-Simeon Farm, 1867
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
The river, Bennecourt, 1868
Oil on canvas,
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA ▼
The magpie, 1869
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Rough sea at Etretat, 1869
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Train in the country, 1870
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Mill near Zaandam, 1871
Oil on canvas, Private collection ▼
The blue house in Zaandam, 1871
Oil on canvas, Private collection ▼
Jean Monet on a mechanical horse, 1872
Oil on canvas, Private collection ▼
Regatta at Argenteuil, 1872
Oil on canvas,
Louvre Museum, Paris, France ▼
The harbour at Argenteuil, 1872
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Red poppies at Argenteuil, 1873
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Impression: Sunrise, 1873
Oil on canvas, Marmottan Museum, Paris, France ▼
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Lilacs in the sun, 1873
Oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA ▼
Autumn at Argenteuil, 1873
Oil on canvas,
Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, UK ▼
Fields of Bezons,1873
Oil on canvas,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemaldegalerie,
Berlin, Germany ▼
The boulevard des Capucines, 1873
Oil on canvas,
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
Kansas City, USA ▼
The bridge at Argenteuil, 1874
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
The studio boat, 1874
Oil on canvas,
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo ▼
Red boats. Argenteuil, 1875
Oil on canvas,
Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, USA ▼
Red boats. Argenteuil, 1875
Oil on canvas,
Louvre Museum, Paris, France ▼
Snow at Argenteuil, 1875
Oil on canvas,
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan ▼
The train in the snow, 1875
Oil on canvas,
Marmottan Museum, Paris, France ▼
The walk. Lady with a parasol, 1875
Oil on canvas,
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA ▼
Madame Monet in Japanese Costume (La Japonaise), 1875
Oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA ▼
The artist’s garden at Giverty, 1900 ▼
Monceau Park, 1878
Oil on canvas,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA ▼
Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878, 1878
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
The road to Vétheuil, 1879
Oil on canvas,
The Art Museum, Göteborg, Sweden ▼
Villas at Bordighera
Oil on canvas ▼
Spring, 1880
Oil on canvas,
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, France ▼
Lavacourt, 1880
Oil on canvas,
The Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, USA ▼
Ice Thawing on the Seine (The Ice Blocks near Vétheuil), 1880
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Vétheuil in the summer, 1880
Oil on canvas,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA ▼
Bank of the Seine. Vétheuil, 1880
Oil on canvas,
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA ▼
Hoarfrost near Vétheuil, 1880
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Clifftop walk at Pourville, 1882
Oil on canvas,
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA ▼
The rocks near Pourville at ebb tide, 1882
Oil on canvas,
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY, USA ▼
The Cape Martin, 1883
Oil on canvas,
Private collection, London, UK ▼
Haystack at Giverny, 1886
Oil on canvas,
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia ▼
Tulip fields in Holland, 1886
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Young girls in a boat, 1887
Oil on canvas,
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan ▼
The bark at Giverny, 1887
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
The fields of poppies, 1887
Oil on canvas,
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia ▼
Haystack. End of the Summer. Morning., 1891
Oil on canvas,
Louvre Museum, Paris, France ▼
Poplars on the banks of the Epte, 1891
Oil on canvas, Private collection ▼
The Seine at Port-Villez. The Harmony in blue, 1894
Oil on canvas,
Tate Gallery, London, UK ▼
Monet’s Garden, the irises, 1900
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
The Waterloo bridge. The fog, 1903
Oil on canvas,
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia ▼
Houses of Parliament, London, 1905
Oil on canvas,
Marmottan Museum, Paris, France ▼
Venice. The Doge Palace, 1912
Oil on canvas,
Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland ▼
Blue water lilies, 1919
Oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France ▼
Water lilies, 1914
Oil on canvas,
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan ▼
