Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, the second son of Claude-Adolphe Monet, a grocer, and Louise-Justine Aubrée. When the boy was about five, the family moved to Le Havre on the Normandy coast, where his father joined the ship-chandlery and grocery business of a relative ^[1]. The port town, with its harbors, beaches, and restless Channel skies, gave Monet the subjects that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

As a teenager he showed little interest in formal schooling but a real gift for caricature. He sold charcoal portraits of local figures for pocket money, and his drawings were displayed in the window of a Le Havre framing shop ^[2]. There, around 1856, he met Eugène Boudin, a local painter who worked directly from nature on the beaches and quaysides. Boudin persuaded the reluctant young caricaturist to try painting outdoors. Monet later credited that encounter with opening his eyes to landscape, and the habit of working in the open air, in front of the motif, became the foundation of his art ^[1].

His mother died in 1857, and his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, an amateur painter herself, supported his ambitions against his father's doubts. In 1859 Monet went to Paris to study art. Rather than enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts, he attended the informal Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro ^[2]. Military service interrupted his training: called up in 1861, he served with a cavalry regiment in Algeria until illness brought him home, and his aunt bought out the remainder of his service on the condition that he study seriously ^[1].

Back in Paris in 1862, Monet entered the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre. The teaching mattered less than the company: among his fellow students were Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille ^[2]. The four painted together in the Forest of Fontainebleau, testing what could be done with quick brushwork, natural light, and scenes of ordinary modern life. Monet also absorbed lessons from the Dutch marine painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom he had met on the Normandy coast and later called a decisive influence on the education of his eye ^[1].

Early success came through the official Salon, which accepted two of his seascapes in 1865. His ambitions then were large: he began an enormous open-air figure composition, Luncheon on the Grass, that he never finished, and in 1866 the Salon accepted his full-length portrait of Camille Doncieux, the young woman who became his companion and model ^[2]. The following years were far harder. Salon juries rejected his most ambitious work, money ran short, and creditors pursued him. Camille gave birth to their first son, Jean, in 1867 while Monet depended on handouts from friends, above all the generous Bazille ^[1].

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 drove Monet, newly married to Camille, to London. There he studied the landscapes of Turner and Constable and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose long commitment to buying and promoting his work would eventually secure his career ^[3]. After a stay in the Netherlands, Monet settled in 1871 at Argenteuil, a town on the Seine near Paris. The Argenteuil years produced some of the freshest painting of the century: regattas, gardens, railway bridges, and river light, rendered in broken strokes of unmixed color. Renoir and Édouard Manet came to paint beside him, and for a time Argenteuil functioned as an open-air laboratory of the new style ^[2].

In April 1874, Monet and his allies, tired of Salon rejections, mounted an independent exhibition in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. Monet showed a harbor scene painted at Le Havre and titled it Impression, Sunrise. The critic Louis Leroy seized on the title in a mocking review headed "Exhibition of the Impressionists," and the name stuck ^[4]. What began as ridicule became the label for the movement that Monet, more than anyone, defined: painting concerned less with the object itself than with the envelope of light and air around it. He took part in five of the eight group exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886 ^[2].

Anyone asking what Claude Monet achievements amount to usually begins with the series paintings of the 1890s. Settled at Giverny and finally prosperous, he painted the same subject over and over as light and season changed: some two dozen canvases of grainstacks shown to acclaim at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1891, then rows of poplars along the river Epte, then more than thirty views of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, painted from rented rooms opposite the church between 1892 and 1894 ^[3]. The point was not the haystack or the stone but the moment: frost, haze, noon glare, dusk. No painter had organized a career around perception itself so systematically.

Travel widened the project. He painted the Mediterranean coast at Bordighera and Antibes, the wild Atlantic rocks of Belle-Île off Brittany, and Norway under snow. Three London campaigns between 1899 and 1901 produced nearly a hundred canvases of the Thames, Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament dissolving in fog ^[3]. A late trip to Venice in 1908 gave him a final foreign subject. By 1900 the once-mocked rebel was among the most celebrated and best-paid painters in France, with collectors in America competing for his work ^[1].

Monet's private life was marked early by poverty and loss. He married Camille Doncieux in 1870, and their second son, Michel, was born in 1878. Camille's health collapsed soon afterward, and she died in September 1879 at Vétheuil, aged thirty-two. Monet painted her on her deathbed, a canvas now in the Musée d'Orsay ^[2]. During those difficult years the Monet household had merged with that of Ernest Hoschedé, a department-store magnate and early collector who went bankrupt, and Hoschedé's wife Alice took charge of both families' children, eight in all. After Ernest's death, Monet and Alice married in 1892 ^[1].

In 1883 Monet rented a house at Giverny, a village where the Epte meets the Seine in Normandy, and bought it in 1890 as his fortunes rose. Gardening became his second art. He laid out flower beds like palettes, diverted water to create a pond, planted it with water lilies, and spanned it with a Japanese-style footbridge, a nod to the Japanese prints he collected and hung throughout the house ^[5]. He liked to say the garden was his finest masterpiece, and it supplied nearly all his subjects for the last thirty years of his life.

Friends described a driven, sometimes despairing worker who slashed canvases that failed him, and a warm host who ran Giverny on a strict timetable built around the light. He rose before dawn, ate enormous lunches, and followed the weather like a farmer. His circle included the novelist Octave Mirbeau, the critic Gustave Geffroy, who wrote the first major Claude Monet biography in 1922, and the statesman Georges Clemenceau, his closest friend in old age ^[6].

The new century brought wealth and grief in almost equal measure. Alice died in 1911, and his elder son Jean died in 1914 after a long illness. Jean's widow, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, herself a painter, stayed on at Giverny to care for the aging artist ^[1]. Monet's eyesight, the instrument of his whole enterprise, began to fail: cataracts, diagnosed in 1912, gradually yellowed and blurred his vision, and his palette in those years darkened and turned toward hot reds and oranges ^[7].

He answered his losses with the most ambitious work of his life. Beginning in 1914 he built a huge new studio at Giverny to house mural-scale canvases of the lily pond, the Grandes Décorations, panels roughly two meters high and up to six meters wide, on which he worked through the First World War while guns were audible from the front ^[6]. The day after the Armistice in November 1918, he offered panels to the French state through Clemenceau as a monument to peace. The gift grew into a scheme of twenty-two panels destined for two oval rooms in the Orangerie in the Tuileries gardens in Paris ^[6].

Clemenceau bullied his friend into cataract surgery in 1923, and with corrective lenses Monet recovered enough sight to revise the great panels. He kept working, doubting, and repainting almost to the end. Claude Monet died of lung cancer at Giverny on December 5, 1926, at the age of eighty-six, and was buried in the village churchyard after a small funeral at which Clemenceau stood by the coffin ^[1]. The Orangerie rooms opened to the public in May 1927 ^[6].

Anyone who asks who was Claude Monet is really asking how modern painting learned to trust the eye. His insistence that a picture records a specific moment of light, and his willingness to let visible brushstrokes carry that record, loosened painting from academic finish and opened the way for the movements that followed. The late water landscapes, with their high horizons and fields of floating color, struck mid-twentieth-century painters and critics as prophecies of abstraction, and Abstract Expressionists in New York looked hard at the Orangerie panels and the large Water Lilies canvases entering American museums in the 1950s ^[7].

The market and the museums confirmed the judgment. Monet's series pictures now anchor collections from the Musée d'Orsay and the Marmottan Monet in Paris, which holds Impression, Sunrise, to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery in London ^[3]. In 2019 one of the grainstack canvases sold at Sotheby's in New York for 110.7 million dollars, at the time a record for any Impressionist work at auction ^[8]. His house and gardens at Giverny, restored and opened to the public in 1980 by the Fondation Claude Monet, draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each season ^[5].

Among the most striking Claude Monet facts is the sheer scale of his output: scholars catalogue roughly two thousand paintings across a working life of nearly seventy years, from teenage caricatures to wall-sized meditations on water. Few artists have stayed so faithful to a single question, what does light actually look like, and answered it so variously. The mocking label of 1874 has become one of the most loved words in art, and the half-blind old man in the Giverny garden remains its truest embodiment ^[4].