Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet, also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet, a founder of French impressionist painting, was the leading figure in the growth of impressionism, a movement in which painters looked to nature for inspiration and used vibrant light and color rather than the solemn browns and blacks of previous paintings. “He was born in Paris, France, on November 14, 1840” (1), son of Adolphe Monet, his father, who was a grocer. In 1845 the family moved to Le Havre, France, where Monet's father and uncle ran a business selling supplies for ships. By fifteen, Monet had become popular as a caricaturist, one who makes exaggerated portraits of people. Through an exhibition of his drawings at a local frame shop in 1858, Monet met Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter who became a great influence on the young artist. Boudin introduced Monet to outdoor painting, an activity that soon became his life's work.

As life continued for Monet, he was faced with the tragedy of a loved one. “On 28 January 1857 his mother died” (3). He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. In June 1861, Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment upon his contracting typhoid. Lonely and saddened, his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre tried to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at a university. It is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter.

In 1862, Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met many great painters. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light and dull colors and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism. He worked at the free Académie Suisse in Paris, which was an art school founded by Charles Suisse. “He loved attending the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for Gustave Courbet and other French painters of the 1850s” (pg.47 5). Through the journey Monet took starting at such a young age, he was gifted with education and experience which helped him grow as an artist.

Eugène Boudin was the first to encourage Monet to paint outdoors, this technique changed Monet's concept of how art could be created as he explains by saying "It was as if a veil was torn from my eyes; I had understood. I grasped what painting could be” (4). Despite being rejected for a scholarship, in 1859, Monet moved to Paris to study with help from his family.

Instead of choosing the more customary career path of a Salon painter, by enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Monet attended the Académie Suisse, where he met fellow artist Camille Pissarro. The École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts is the “distinguished National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France” (2). The Académie Suisse was an art school founded by Charles Suisse and is located at the corner of the Quai des Orfévres and the Boulevard du Palais, in Paris.

Most major French artists frequently visited this place to meet colleagues or to study after the models supplied.

“Claude Monet was among the leaders of the French Impressionist movement of the 1870s and 1880s” (1). His 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise gave the style its name. As an inspirational talent and a personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Inspired in the 1860s by the Realists' interest in painting outside, Monet would later bring the technique to one of his most famous of series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Master as a colorist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters. Monet’s early work is indebted to the Realists' interests in depicting contemporary subject matter, without idealization, and in painting outdoors in order to capture the fleeting qualities of nature. Inspired by Edouard Manet, Monet gradually began to develop a distinctive style of his own in the late 1860s.

Monet departed from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, and he experimented with loose handling, bold color, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures shifted from figures to the qualities of light and the atmosphere in the scene, as he grew older, he became ever more attentive to light and color. In order to capture the ever-changing effects of light on the canvas he had to paint rapidly, analyzing tone and color at the expense of composition. Drawing

became increasingly sensitive to the decorative qualities of color and form. He then began to apply paint in smaller strokes, building it up in broad fields of color. In the 1880s, he began to explore the possibilities of a decorative paint surface, harmonies and contrasts of color.

The effects that he achieved, particularly in the series paintings of the 1890s, represent a remarkable advance towards abstraction and towards a modern painting focused purely on surface effects.

During this Impressionism time period, was an outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, while Monet took refuge in England in September 1870. 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. “The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia” (2). Even though Monet had a son as a soldier in World War I, no note of sorrow even touches his paintings.

After briefly returning to Holland, he created over 25 pieces. When he painted Impression, Sunrise he was depicting a Le Havre landscape. “It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris” (pg 73 5). From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended as little worth but which the Impressionists made suitable for themselves. Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, museum in Paris, where he witnessed painters copying from the old masters.

While he was in Paris for several years, he met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.

Several artists influenced Monet's style and the development of his art work including Manet, Boudin, Hokusai and Jongkind. Camille Doncieaux