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Claude Monet (aka Claude Oscar Monet) Painter French (Paris, 1840 - 1926, Giverny) View objects by this artist.

     Monet was born in Paris on February 14, 1840 the son of a grocer; his parents refused to support him in a career as an artist, offering to buy him out of his military service if he would abandon the idea. This he refused to do, and by the time he was sixteen he had a local reputation as a caricaturist in his home city of Le Havre. His interest in landscape was stimulated by painters who came to Le Havre to paint the port or the beaches, particularly by Eugene Boudin. In 1859, at the age of 19, Monet went to Paris. That year he visited the Salon several times. He refused to return home or to enter the Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts, but began instead at the Atelier Suisse, where Gustave Courbet had worked and Camille Pissarro sometimes came. At a dealer's exhibition the following year, Monet noticed pictures by Courbet, Eugene Delacroix, and the works of the Barbizon School. Meanwhile he often found members of Courbet's circle airing their ideas at the Brasserie des Martyrs.

    Monet's military service interrupted his life in Paris. Two years in Algeria in an African regiment made him seriously ill, and his father was forced to buy him out of the four years that remained. He returned home to Le Havre, where he met the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, eventually an even stronger influence on him than Boudin. Back in Paris at the end of 1862, Monet enrolled, at his parents wish, in Charles Gleyre's studio at the Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts. Even at this stage he was a conscious rebel against the established cannons of painting. He and his fellow students, Bazille, Renoir, and Sisley, formed a group apart from the others. In 1863 they spent Easter together at Chailly in the Fontainebleau Forest, painting tree studies in the open air. Gleyre's studio shut down at the end of that year.

      By the beginning of 1865 Monet was very short of money. Bazille let him share his Paris studio. Then Monet had two views of the Seine estuary hung at the 1865 Salon. His name was confused by some of the spectators with that of Edouard Manet, who was startled and irritated to be complimented on Monet's work. Monet for his part had been an admirer of Manet since the Salon des Rufuses of 1863 and was planning a huge Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe to rival his. Unlike Manet's, it was to be painted as far as possible in the open air. In the forest at Chailly he made preliminary studies and began the final composition. But Courbet, whose freedom of brushwork he had learned to follow, came to visit him and suggested alterations that he accordingly made and afterwards regretted. He abandoned the canvas and later painted a portrait of one of his sitters, his mistress Camille Doncieux, to take its place at the Salon of 1866. This was accepted, described by the writer Emile Zola as full of energy and life, and praised by many other reviewers. This temporary success persuaded Monet's parents to renew his allowance. He was able to paint some views of Paris, experimenting with color and light, and his ambitious Woman in the Garden, the first exact record of outdoor light falling upon figures. It was over eight feet high, and had to be lowered into a trench dug in the garden to enable him to paint the top.

     In 1867 he was again in acute financial difficulties. Bazille bought Woman in the Garden, arranging to pay for it in installments over four years so that Monet should have an income. Even this did not save the situation. The picture was rejected at the 1867 Salon, and Camille was expecting a child. Monet was obliged to return home for the summer, leaving her in Paris, where she gave birth to Jean Monet. His circumstances were so hopeless that Monet was near to attempting suicide.

      The following years were not much better. He often could not afford paints, and sometimes what he had been able to do was appropriated by his creditors. But in Paris at the Cafe Guerbois, a meeting place for painters and writers where technical questions were frequently discussed, he was inspired to make further experiments. With Sisley and Pissarro he concentrated on winter landscapes. And in Bougival on the Seine he and Renoir made a study of the effect of light on water. When Renoir too was desperate, Monet encouraged him.

          In June, 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Monet married Camille. In the autumn he fled to London. There he was introduced to Durand-Ruel, a dealer who was to be for many years the chief patron of Impressionism. Pissarro was also in London, and he and Monet painted together in the open air and saw the Constables and Turners in the museums. After the war, and a visit to Holland, Monet returned to France to settle with Camille in Argenteuil, on the Seine near Paris. A studio boat was built so that he could watch the light on the water. Renoir sometimes worked with him, and in the summer of 1874 they were joined by Manet, who was finally persuaded to overcome his prejudice against painting out-of-doors.

     Monet was largely responsible for the first group show of the Impressionists, held in Paris in 1874. It was his painting Impression: Sunrise, 1872, that gave a focal point to the ridacule roused by the exhibition and its name to the Impressionist movement. For the next few years he was still in financial straits. With some help from Manet he struggled on. His second son, Michel, was born in 1878; in the autumn of 1879 Camille died.

     In desperation, Monet submitted work to the Salon in 1880, for the first time in ten years. One painting was accepted. That year he also had a show of his own, and things became a little easier. Accused by Edgar Degas of pandering to officialdom, he did not exhibit at the Salon again. But he exhibited in most of the Impressionist group shows, several times in London, in Brussels with Les XX, and in New York when Durand-Ruel took 50 of his canvases there. To the dealer's annoyance, he also showed in Paris in a rival gallery, that of Georges Petit.

     Monet worked in many places, mostly near Paris, with occasional trips to the south of France, Venice, Holland, and London. After the death of Camille he lived with the widow of his friend and patron Ernest Hoschede, later she became his second wife. In 1890 he bought the house on the river Epte at Giverny that was his home from 1883 until his death in 1926.

Source:  http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/m/Claude_Monet/index.html

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