Claude Monet
1840-1926
Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting. He was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plain-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.
Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris. 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Monet undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at universities, 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.
Monet's "Camille" or" The Woman in the Green Dress", which brought him recognition, was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux. In England he studied the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color. In 1872, he painted "Impression, Sunrise" depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. From the painting's title, was coined the term "Impressionism".
In 1870, Monet married Camille Doncieux They had a two sons. Madame Monet died of tuberculosis in 1879. Monet moved into the home of Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. After her husband was bankrupted, Alice Hoschedé, helped to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, alongside her own six children. They moved to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden and painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet began "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day.
Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own garden in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine.
Monet died 1926 at the age of 86.
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