Claude Monet

Born Oscar-Claude Monet in Paris on 10 November 1840, Monet moved with his family to Le Havre at the age of five. His early work as a caricaturist (ca. 1856) drew the attention of the painter Eugene Boudin, who, along with J.B. Jongkind, first convinced Monet of his vocation as an open-air landscape painter. Monet met Jongkind in 1862 while studying in the atelier of academic painter Charles Gleyre (1806-1874). Monet produced his first significant works in 1864, which were exhibited in the Salon the following year.

Throughout the second half of the 1860s Monet worked closely with a group of young painters whom he had also met in Gleyre's atelier: Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Drawing on a wide range of precedents in recent, naturalistic French painting--particularly the work of Courbet, Corot, and the Barbizon school of landscape --the young artists painted landscapes, still lifes, and figurative works, employing a frank, direct manner of paint application. Like the previous generation of open-air landscape painters, they occasionally worked in the Forest Fontainebleau, where Monet began the immensely ambitious Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a response to Manet's famous work of the same title of 1863. Monet would never complete this painting, which was to be a monumental (4 x 6 meters) merging of open-air techniques with a portrayal of modern types, gestures, and dress (two large fragments are in Paris, Musée d'Orsay, and a large, final sketch is in Moscow, Puschkin Museum). Monet's next major work, the Women in the Garden, was rejected from the Salon of 1867, the year of Monet's first paintings of Paris (see Main Text). The Paris works were quickly followed by another group of successful landscapes with figures, executed in the fashionable resorts of the Normandy coast.

In the 1870s Monet became a leading member of the Impressionist group. In 1883 he settled in Giverny, about fifty miles west of Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. During the 1890s, after his second marriage and the purchase of the property at Giverny, he began to develop extensive flower and water gardens, which he first painted in the late 1890s with a series devoted to a Japanese bridge, and which became his chief subject for the rest of his life.