Claude Monet
Share
1. Who was Claude Monet, and why does he matter?
Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a French painter who founded and remained throughout his long life the most devoted practitioner of Impressionism, the movement that transformed Western art in the second half of the nineteenth century. He matters for several reasons at once. He helped overturn centuries of academic convention about how paintings should look and what they should depict. He was the first artist to make the changing effects of light, rather than the objects light fell upon, the true subject of his work. His painting Impression, Sunrise gave the entire Impressionist movement its name. And in the last decades of his life, his vast series of water lily canvases at Giverny opened a path toward abstraction that influenced twentieth-century art in ways he could not have imagined. He is now the most widely recognised of all the Impressionists, and his work continues to attract larger museum audiences than almost any other painter in history.
2. What was Monet's early life, and how did he come to painting?
Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840 but grew up from the age of five on the Normandy coast near Le Havre, where his father ran a grocery and ships' provisions business. He showed an early talent as a caricaturist, selling witty portraits of local figures as a teenager and earning something of a local reputation. His first encounter with serious painting came through Eugène Boudin, an older landscape painter who invited the teenage Monet to join him painting scenes outdoors on the Norman coast. It was Boudin who introduced Monet to the practice of painting en plein air, working directly in front of the subject rather than in a studio, a habit that would shape everything Monet did for the rest of his life. Against his father's wishes, who wanted him to join the family business, Monet was determined from an early age to be a painter.
3. How did Monet come to develop his mature style?
In 1862 Monet moved to Paris and enrolled in the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre, where he met Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, the core of what would become the Impressionist group. Dissatisfied with academic conventions, these young painters ventured into the countryside together to paint outdoors, experimenting with capturing the effects of light and atmosphere with rapid, broken brushstrokes and vivid colour rather than the smooth, blended surfaces demanded by official taste. A decisive early influence came when Monet fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and discovered the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, whose atmospheric handling of light reinforced his own instincts. When he returned and settled at Argenteuil on the Seine, the style that would become Impressionism took full shape: visible phenomena captured at a specific moment, with the shimmering surface of paint matching the shimmering surface of what he saw.
4. What was the first Impressionist exhibition, and how did Impressionism get its name?
In 1874, tired of rejection by the official Salon and determined to show their work on their own terms, Monet and a group of like-minded painters, including Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Berthe Morisot, organised an independent exhibition in Paris. It was a radical act: bypassing the entire machinery of the French academic art world. Among the works Monet showed was a painting he had made of the harbour at Le Havre in the early morning, which he called Impression, Sunrise. A hostile critic, Louis Leroy, seized on the title and wrote a sarcastic review labelling the whole group "Impressionists," meaning that their work was nothing more than rough, unfinished impressions. The painters adopted the name defiantly, and it stuck. The term that had been intended as an insult became the label for one of the most important movements in the history of art.
5. Who were the key people in Monet's personal life?
In the 1860s Monet met Camille Doncieux, who became his model, companion, and eventually his wife. She appears in many of his finest early paintings, including the celebrated Camille, or Woman in the Green Dress of 1866. They had two sons, Jean and Michel. The years around 1870 were both creatively exciting and personally difficult: Monet and Camille married just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and their financial situation was frequently desperate. Camille’s health declined steadily after the birth of their second son Michel in 1878, and she died on 5 September 1879 at the age of thirty-two. Monet famously painted her face on her deathbed, later telling his friend Georges Clemenceau that he was helplessly analysing the colours of death even as he grieved. By this time a close relationship had developed between Monet and Alice Hoschedé, the wife of one of his patrons. After Camille’s death the two families merged, and Monet and Alice married in 1892 after her husband’s death.
In the 1860s Monet met Camille Doncieux, who became his model, companion, and eventually his wife. She appears in many of his finest early paintings, including the celebrated Camille, or Woman in the Green Dress of 1866. They had two sons, Jean and Michel. The years around 1870 were both creatively exciting and personally difficult: Monet and Camille married just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and their financial situation was frequently desperate. Camille’s health declined steadily after the birth of their second son Michel in 1878, and she died on 5 September 1879 at the age of thirty-two. Monet famously painted her face on her deathbed, later telling his friend Georges Clemenceau that he was helplessly analysing the colours of death even as he grieved. By this time a close relationship had developed between Monet and Alice Hoschedé, the wife of one of his patrons. After Camille’s death the two families merged, and Monet and Alice married in 1892 after her husband’s death.
6. How did Monet's famous series paintings come about?
Monet's series method, returning to the same subject under different conditions of light, weather, and season, was not fully developed until the 1890s, though he had been exploring related ideas throughout his career. His first major series focused on haystacks in the fields around Giverny, painted from 1890 to 1891. When twenty-five of these canvases were exhibited together, the effect was revelatory: viewers could see, side by side, how the same simple form was utterly transformed by the changing light of dawn, midday, winter, summer, and fog. He followed this with a series of poplars along the Epte river, and then his celebrated paintings of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, where the ancient stone shifts through dozens of states as the light of day moves across it. The series method was a radical argument: that no single moment or condition is the truth of a thing, and that reality can only be glimpsed through accumulation.
7. What was Giverny, and why was it so important to Monet?
In 1883 Monet rented a house in the small village of Giverny, about eighty kilometers north-west of Paris in the Seine valley, and bought it in 1890. He would spend the last forty-three years of his life there. At Giverny he created two extraordinary gardens: a flower garden in front of the house, where he arranged blooms by color with a painter's eye, and a water garden on a piece of land he acquired nearby, which he landscaped around a pond fed by a tributary of the Seine. Over this pond he built a Japanese-style bridge and planted water lilies. The garden was designed not merely for pleasure but as a subject to paint, what he called "a palette of plants." The water lily pond in particular became the central obsession of his old age, an endlessly variable theatre of light, reflection, and color that occupied him for the rest of his life and produced his most ambitious work.
In 1883 Monet rented a house in the small village of Giverny, about eighty kilometers north-west of Paris in the Seine valley, and bought it in 1890. He would spend the last forty-three years of his life there. At Giverny he created two extraordinary gardens: a flower garden in front of the house, where he arranged blooms by color with a painter's eye, and a water garden on a piece of land he acquired nearby, which he landscaped around a pond fed by a tributary of the Seine. Over this pond he built a Japanese-style bridge and planted water lilies. The garden was designed not merely for pleasure but as a subject to paint, what he called "a palette of plants." The water lily pond in particular became the central obsession of his old age, an endlessly variable theatre of light, reflection, and color that occupied him for the rest of his life and produced his most ambitious work.
8. What were the Grandes Décorations, and how did they come about?
After promising his friend and ally, former Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, a gift of paintings to celebrate the end of the First World War, Monet eventually donated an enormous cycle of water lily panels to the French state. Known as the Grandes Décorations, these monumental canvases, some nearly two meters high and extending in unbroken horizontal sweeps, were conceived to wrap around the viewer in two purpose-built oval rooms at the Orangerie museum in Paris. Monet had begun working on the project during the war years as a way of finding purpose amid personal loss, and he worked obsessively on it for the remainder of his life, reworking and sometimes destroying canvases. The installation opened at the Orangerie in May 1927, five months after his death. The painter André Masson later described the rooms as the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.
9. How did Monet's failing eyesight affect his work?
From around 1912 Monet began to develop cataracts in both eyes, a condition that worsened steadily over the following decade. As his vision deteriorated, his paintings changed: colors became muddier and more brown, forms less distinct, brushwork broader. He labelled his paint tubes to keep them in order and relied on memory and habit as much as perception. He resisted surgery for years, fearing its consequences, and the condition cast him into periods of deep despair. He finally underwent an operation on his right eye in 1923, which restored some functional vision after a difficult recovery and the use of corrective lenses. His late water lily canvases, painted during the worst years of his cataracts, are among the most contested in his output: some scholars see in them a falling away, others an advance, their expanding scale, dissolving forms, and charged brushwork anticipating abstract expressionism by a generation. With restored sight after surgery, Monet returned to his work and continued refining the Grandes Décorations until close to his death.
From around 1912 Monet began to develop cataracts in both eyes, a condition that worsened steadily over the following decade. As his vision deteriorated, his paintings changed: colors became muddier and more brown, forms less distinct, brushwork broader. He labelled his paint tubes to keep them in order and relied on memory and habit as much as perception. He resisted surgery for years, fearing its consequences, and the condition cast him into periods of deep despair. He finally underwent an operation on his right eye in 1923, which restored some functional vision after a difficult recovery and the use of corrective lenses. His late water lily canvases, painted during the worst years of his cataracts, are among the most contested in his output: some scholars see in them a falling away, others an advance, their expanding scale, dissolving forms, and charged brushwork anticipating abstract expressionism by a generation. With restored sight after surgery, Monet returned to his work and continued refining the Grandes Décorations until close to his death.
10. How did Monet's life end, and what is his legacy?
Monet died at Giverny on 5 December 1926 at the age of eighty-six, from lung cancer. He was buried in a simple ceremony in the village churchyard, as he had wished. At his death he was already famous, but the full measure of his influence took decades to become clear. His late water lily paintings, which spent years in storage after his death, were rediscovered and reappraised in the 1950s when American abstract painters began citing their enormous, boundary-dissolving surfaces as a precedent for their own work. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other abstract expressionists had independently arrived at a visual language that Monet, it turned out, had already approached. His house and gardens at Giverny were bequeathed to the French Academy of Fine Arts by his son Michel and opened to the public in 1980 after careful restoration. They now receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. Monet's paintings regularly appear among the most expensive ever sold at auction, and Impression, Sunrise remains one of the most recognizable images in the history of art.