2. Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5
December 1926) was a French painter, 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. The term
"Impressionism" is derived from the title of
his painting Impression, soleil levant
(Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in
1874 in the first of the independent
exhibitions mounted by Monet and his
associates as an alternative to the Salon de
Paris.
3. Monet's ambition of documenting the French
countryside led him to adopt a method of
painting the same scene many times in order
to capture the changing of light and the
passing of the seasons.From 1883, Monet
lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house
and property and began a vast landscaping
project which included lily ponds that would
become the subjects of his best-known
works. He began painting the water lilies in
1899, first in vertical views with a Japanese
bridge as a central feature and later in the
series of large-scale paintings that was to
occupy him continuously for the next 20
years of his life.
4. Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840. He was the second
son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet.
On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church,
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called
him simply Oscar. Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet later
became an atheist.
In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father
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, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the
arts. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-
François Ochard. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he
met fellow artist Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him
to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor)
techniques for painting.Both were influenced by Johan Barthold
Jongkind.
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.
5. When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed
painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints
and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a
window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several
years and met other young painters, including Édouard Manet and
others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists.
After drawing a low ballot number in March 1861, Monet was
drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria
for a seven-year period of military service. While in Algeria Monet
did only a few sketches of casbah scenes, a single landscape, and
several portraits of officers, all of which have been lost. In a Le
Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light
and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the germ of my
future researches". After about a year of garrison duty, Monet
briefly went absent without leave. Following convalescence,
Monet's aunt intervened to remove him from the army if he
agreed to complete a 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.
6. In January 1865 Monet was working on a version of Le
déjeune sur l'herbe, aiming to present it for hanging at the
Salon, which had rejected Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
two years earlier. Monet's painting was very large and could
not be completed in time. Monet submitted instead a
painting of Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress, one
of many works using his future wife, Camille Doncieux, as
his model. Both this painting and a small landscape were
hung.The following year Monet used Camille for his model
in Women in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine.
Camille became pregnant and gave birth to their first
child.Monet and Camille married on 28 June 1870, just
before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War,and, after
their excursion to London and Zaandam, they moved to
Argenteuil, in December 1871. During this time Monet
painted various works of modern life. He and Camille lived
in poverty for most of this period. Following the successful
exhibition of some maritime paintings, and the winning of
a silver medal at Le Havre, Monet's paintings were seized
by creditors.
7. From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-
minded artists met with rejection from the
conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts, which
held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris.
During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred
Sisley,organized the Société anonyme des
artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs
(Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and
Engravers) to exhibit their artworks
independently. At their first exhibition, held in
April 1874, Monet exhibited the work that was to
give the group its lasting name. He was inspired
by the style and subject matter of previous
modern painters Camille Pissarro and Edouard
Manet.
8. Impression, Sunrise was painted in 1872,
depicting a Le Havre port landscape. From
the painting's title the art critic Louis Leroy,
in his review coined the term
"Impressionism". It was intended as
disparagement but the Impressionists
appropriated the term for themselves.
