Claude Monet (French pronounced also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude
Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 ¨C December 5, 1926) 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 plein-air landscape painting. The term
Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.
Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte,
in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude-
Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubr¨¦e Monet, both of them second-generation
Parisians. On May 20, 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church,
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre
in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store
business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a
singer. On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary
school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal
caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also
undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois Ochard, a former
student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about
1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugene Boudin who became his mentor and
taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor)
techniques for painting.
On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school,
and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
When Monet traveled to Paris to visit The Louvre, he witnessed painters
copying from the old masters. Monet, having brought his paints and other
tools with him, would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw.
Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would
become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was ¨¦douard
Manet.
In June of 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in
Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment, but upon his contracting
typhoid his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre intervened 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. Disillusioned with the traditional art
taught at universities, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in
Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred
Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of
light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later
came to be known as Impressionism.
Monet's Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme a la Robe Verte),
painted in 1866, brought him recognition, and was one of many works
featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the
figures in The Women in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On
the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter
Doncieux became pregnant and bore their first child, Jean. In 1868, due to
financial reasons, Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the
Seine.
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