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Claude Monet
By peace | December 13, 2007
Claude Monet
Also Known As: Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet
Born: 14th Nov 1840
Birthplace: Paris, France
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Painter
Nationality: France
Mother: Louise Monet
Son: Jean Monet
Wife: Camille Doncieux (m. 1870), Alice Hoschedé (m. 1892)
Son: Michel Monet
Death: 5th Dec 1926
Location of death: Giverny, France
Cause of death: Lung Cancer
Remains: Buried, Giverny Church Cemetery, Giverny, France
Biography of Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a French painter born in Paris, 1840. One of the creators of impressionism, Claude Monet is the eldest son of a Parisian shopkeeper. His paintings captured scenes of middle-class life and the ever-changing qualities of sunlight in nature. His technique of applying bright, unmixed colors in quick, short strokes became a hallmark of impressionism . He told a critic in 1880; innocence and spontaneity were the basis of his art.
The family moved in 1845, and he spent his childhood in the port town of Le Havre. Young Monet had a talent for caricature. He took his early painting lessons there from the painter Eugen Boudin, who specialized in scenes of people strolling on beaches, worked up sketches out-of-doors. Boudin took an interest in him and showed him how to paint landscapes in the open and advised him to seek further training in Paris. Monet went there in 1859, but ignored the guidance he had gone to seek.
Monet’s formal art training began in 1859 at the Académie Suisse, a studio that provided models for aspiring artists to draw or paint, but gave little direct instruction. Another future leader of the impressionists, Camille Pissarro, was a fellow student there, and the two soon became close friends. After serving briefly in the French military in Algeria, monet joined a Parisian studio run by Charles Gabriel Gleyre in 1862. Gleyre’s studio was essentially student-run. Like the Adadémie Suisse, it encouraged students to draw from models, rather than from plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues, which was the common teaching method of more conservative academies. In Gleyre’s studio monet met several artists who would become fellow impressionists, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Bazille, who came from a wealthy family, gave monet regular financial support during the 1860s.
In 1865 monet had his first works—two ambitious seascapes—accepted by the Salon, a juried art exhibition sponsored annually by the official French Academy of Fine Arts. Thereafter he had a checkered record of acceptance and rejection by the conservative Salon jury, although his works received praise from critics such as French writer Émile Zola and were purchased by discerning and influential buyers.
Monet’s canvases from the mid-1860s were massive. The unfinished Luncheon on the Grass, a picnic scene begun in 1865, was originally intended to measure roughly 4.5 m by 6 m (15 ft by 20 ft). For two other large paintings from that time, monet’s future wife Camille Doncieux posed in elegant attire: The Green Dress (1866, Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany), which was shown in the Salon of 1866, and Women in the Garden (1867, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). After the Salon rejected Women in the Garden for its 1867 exhibition, monet may have reconsidered investing so much effort in a single painting that might not sell, and he began to work on a smaller scale.
In 1869 monet and Renoir painted a series of landscapes en plein air (outdoors) at a fashionable bathing place, La Grenouillère, on the Seine River near Paris. In these small works, monet’s quick daubs of fresh colors aptly capture the movement of the water and gaiety of the scene.
Despite his father’s disapproval, in 1870 monet married Camille, who had already borne him a son. To escape the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), during which German troops threatened Paris, the couple went to London, then to Holland. They returned in 1872 and settled in Argenteuil, a sailing center on the Seine River outside Paris. Monet painted numerous vibrant, light-filled views of this fast-growing suburban town; he also produced more intimate family studies.
The painters who became known as impressionists began exhibiting together in 1874. They held eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and although Monet did not participate in all of these, he became the most celebrated member of the group, and remains so today.
In the 1874 exhibition, Monet showed four pastels and five paintings, among them a work entitled Impression: Sunrise (1872-1873, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Inspired by this title, French art critic Louis Leroy coined the term impressionist in a satirical review of the exhibition. His comments criticized the artists for painting so loosely and neglecting to blend their brushstrokes carefully in order to achieve the polished effect that was then expected. Although Impression: Sunrise is an elegantly balanced composition, it demonstrates much of what was radically new about the impressionist manner. Monet’s swift strokes capture a momentary effect of light on water in a busy port, while mist and smoke blur the angular forms of sailboats.
Monet’s first wife, Camille, died in 1879, and soon afterward Monet set up home with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of one of his most important patrons, and their respective children. The Hoschedé family had recently suffered a disastrous bankruptcy, and financial concerns seem to have directed many of Monet’s career strategies in the years that followed.
In 1880 Monet decided, to the great annoyance of his fellow impressionists, to exhibit once again at the official Salon. He also began to sell his work regularly through private dealers. Monet traveled throughout France during the 1880s, tackling new and challenging motifs, such as the rocks off the island of Belle Île, the stormy Atlantic coast, and the more idyllic atmosphere of the Mediterranean seacoast.
In his late years Claude Monet suffered from physical problems. After 1907 a bad eyesight and rheumatism made it more and more impossible for him to paint. But he continued until the year of his death. The great project over the last years was centered around his garden with a pond of water lilies and a Japanese bridge. He had even constructed a studio in his garden, so that he could paint more easily without being exposed to the weather outside.
In February 1926, at the age of 83, he could finish the last great challenge of his life - a commission by the French government for 22 mural paintings of water lilies. On December 5, 1926 Claude Monet died from lung cancer.
Topics: Famous People |
December 15th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
[…] His Early Life: Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On May 20, 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. Read More About Claude Monet Biography. […]
December 15th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
[…] Claude Monet is generally considered to be the most outstanding figure among Impressionists. The term Impressionism derives from his picture Impression: Sunrise. A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue of the exhibition in 1874. Monet suggested simply Impression, and the catalogue editor, Renoir’s brother Edouard, added an explanatory Sunrise. The artist was not to know that because of criticism which seized upon the first word he had given the entire movement its name. […]
December 16th, 2007 at 8:33 am
[…] is Claude Monet, someone whom I admired for his work, not for his life. He is known to have an affair during his […]
December 21st, 2007 at 7:54 am
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