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Claude Monet
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Claude Monet
WHO WAS MONET
DATE OF PLACE AND BIRTH AND HIS FAMILY
WHEN HE STARTED TO PAINT
DEATH OF MONET
MONETS REVELATION
WHAT MOVEMENTS INSPIRED THE ARTIST
SOME OF HIS PAINTINGS
Claude Monet was 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, especially as applied to plain-air landscape
painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the
title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.] He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. 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. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
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.
On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school
of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures,
which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also
undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François
Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the
beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857, he met fellow
artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him
to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor)
techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan
Barthold Jongkind.
Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of
86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had
insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty
people attended the ceremony.
Monet is working with a large canvas in his garden since the early morning. It
was probably not easy to carry his canvas to the bank of the pond near the
blossoming bush, where he sits painting.
He paints quickly to capture his "subject" deftly, as the sun moves
unstoppably within the sky. Distance is hazy. Solar beams, piercing
translucent cold air, will soon lie down on the ground in absolutely different
colour spots. Naturally, Monet does not draw; he has banished drawing from
his paintings. Instead, he works directly with color, cementing images to the
canvas with pure paints. He puts them on the white priming with light touches,
one close to another.
When examining closely, the canvas seems to be simply a uniform surface, scattered with loose, chaotic spots. However, one has to only move away a little form it to witness a miracle: motley strokes are blending and transforming into lively flowers tousled by wind, into ripples on the water, into trembling and rustling leaves - yes, sound is heard and aromas are felt in the painting. Frankness and inconstant instants of life are reflected in his paints. There is nothing between the eye of the painter reading the color and the canvas receiving the equivalent of this color - neither plan nor idea, nor a literary plot; we witness a new method of creating art - art that greatly expresses the mindset of a person in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.
This is the revelation of Claude Monet.
Movements:
As William Seitz wrote, "The landscapes Monet painted at Argenteuil between 1872 and 1877 are his best-known, most popular works, and it was during these years that impressionism most closely approached a group style." Monet exhibited regularly in the impressionist group shows, the first of which took place in 1874. On that occasion his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a newspaper critic to call all the artists "impressionists," and the name stuck. Monet and the impressionists discovered that even the darkest shadows and the gloomiest days contain a wide variety of colors. However, Monet learned that he had to paint quickly and to use short brushstrokes loaded with individual colors.
During the 1880s the impressionists began to drift apart, although individual members continued to see one another and occasionally work together. Monet gradually gained critical and financial (relating to money) success during the late 1880s and the 1890s. This was due mainly to the efforts of Durand-Ruel, who sponsored one-man exhibitions of Monet's work as early as 1883 and who, in 1886, also organized the first large-scale impressionist group show to take place in the United States.
Paintings The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest, 1865
Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1867
