Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it.
75 Facts About Claude Monet
2.
Claude Monet was raised in Le Havre, Normandy, and became interested in the outdoors and drawing from an early age.
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Claude Monet was very close to his mother, but she died in January 1857 when he was sixteen years old, and he was sent to live with his childless, widowed but wealthy aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
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From 1883, Claude Monet lived in Giverny, in northern France, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond.
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Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.
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Claude Monet was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubree Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians.
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Claude Monet's mother was a singer, and supported Monet's desire for a career in art.
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Claude Monet was an apathetic student who, after showing skill in art from young age, began drawing caricatures and portraits of acquaintances at age 15 for money.
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Claude Monet began his first drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David.
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Claude Monet thought of Boudin as his master, whom "he owed everything to" for his later success.
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Claude Monet lived with his father and aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre; Lecadre would be a source of support for Monet in his early art career.
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From 1858 to 1860, Claude Monet continued his studies in Paris, where he enrolled in Academie Suisse and met Camille Pissarro in 1859.
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Claude Monet was called for military service and served under the Chasseurs d'Afrique, in Algeria, from 1861 to 1862.
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In search of motifs, they traveled to Honfleur where Claude Monet painted several "studies" of the harbor and the mouth of the Seine.
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Claude Monet often painted alongside Renoir and Alfred Sisley, both of whom shared his desire to articulate new standards of beauty in conventional subjects.
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Claude Monet sent no more works to the Salon until his single, final attempt in 1880.
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Claude Monet's work was considered radical, "discouraged at all official levels".
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Claude Monet had a strong relationship with Jean, claiming that Camille was his lawful wife so Jean would be considered legitimate.
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Claude Monet's father stopped financially supporting him as a result of the relationship.
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Claude Monet loved his family dearly, painting many portraits of them such as child with a cup, a portrait of Jean Claude Monet.
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Claude Monet married Camille on 28 June 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
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Claude Monet repeatedly painted the Thames, Hyde Park and Green Park.
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Claude Monet acquired a sailboat to paint on the river.
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Paintings such as Gladioli marked what was likely the first time Claude Monet had cultivated a garden for the purpose of his art.
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Claude Monet was inspired by the style and subject matter of his slightly older contemporaries, Pissarro and Edouard Manet.
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Claude Monet gained a reputation as the foremost landscape painter of the group.
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At the first exhibition, in 1874, Claude Monet displayed, among others, Impression, Sunrise, The Luncheon and Boulevard des Capucines.
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Claude Monet later regretted inspiring the name, as he believed that they were a group "whose majority had nothing impressionist".
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Claude Monet priced Impression: Sunrise at 1000 francs but failed to sell it.
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Claude Monet displayed 18 paintings, including The Beach at Sainte-Adresse which showcased multiple Impressionist characteristics.
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The Luncheon, 1868, Stadel, which features Camille Doncieux and Jean Claude Monet, was rejected by the Paris Salon of 1870 but included in the first Impressionists' exhibition in 1874.
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Claude Monet explained: "I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife's dead face and just systematically noting the colours according to an automatic reflex".
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Claude Monet submitted two paintings to the Salon in 1880, one of which was accepted.
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Claude Monet began to abandon Impressionist techniques as his paintings utilised darker tones and displayed environments, such as the Seine river, in harsh weather.
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Alice's third daughter, Suzanne, would become Claude Monet's "preferred model", after Camille.
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Claude Monet travelled to the Netherlands in 1886 to paint the tulips.
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Claude Monet soon met and became friends with Gustave Geffroy, who published an article on Monet.
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The family worked and built up the gardens, and Claude Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings.
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Claude Monet wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books.
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Claude Monet remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners.
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Claude Monet begun a series of Mornings on the Seine, which portrayed the dawn hours of the river.
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Claude Monet had exhibited this first group of pictures of the garden, devoted primarily to his Japanese bridge, in 1900.
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At his house, Claude Monet met with artists, writers, intellectuals and politicians from France, England, Japan and the United States.
44.
In 1913, Claude Monet travelled to London to consult the German ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich.
45.
Claude Monet was prescribed new glasses and rejected cataract surgery for the right eye.
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The next year, Claude Monet, encouraged by Clemenceau, made plans to construct a new, large studio that he could use to create a "decorative cycle of paintings devoted to the water garden".
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Claude Monet approached painting by formulating the ideas and features in his mind, taking the "motif in large masses" and transcribing them through memory and imagination.
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Claude Monet's output decreased as he became withdrawn, although he did produce several panel paintings for the French Government, from 1914 to 1918 to great financial success and he would later create works for the state.
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In 1919, Claude Monet began a series of landscape paintings, "in full force" although he was not pleased with the outcome.
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Claude Monet became deeply dedicated to the decorations of his garden during the war.
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Claude Monet has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism".
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Claude Monet wished to demonstrate how light altered colour and perception of reality.
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Claude Monet utilised pencil drawings to quickly note subjects and motifs for future reference.
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Claude Monet [felt] particularly drawn towards nature when it is embellished and towards urban scenes and for preference he paint[ed] flowery gardens, parks and groves.
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Claude Monet often depicted the suburban and rural leisure activities of Paris and as a young artist experimented with still lifes.
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Claude Monet began to think in terms of colours and shapes rather than scenes and objects.
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Claude Monet used bright colours in dabs and dashes and squiggles of paint.
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In 1877 a series of paintings at St-Lazare Station had Claude Monet looking at smoke and steam and the way that they affected colour and visibility, being sometimes opaque and sometimes translucent.
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Claude Monet was to further use this study in the painting of the effects of mist and rain on the landscape.
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The study of the effects of atmosphere was to evolve into a number of series of paintings in which Claude Monet repeatedly painted the same subject in different lights, at different hours of the day, and through the changes of weather and season.
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Claude Monet refined his palette in the 1870s, consciously minimising the use of darker tones and favouring pastel colours.
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Claude Monet increasingly used red and yellow tones, a trend that first started following his trip to Venice.
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Between 1883 and 1908, Claude Monet travelled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, including a series of paintings in Venice.
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In 1901, Claude Monet enlarged the pond of his home by buying a meadow located on the other side of the Ru, the local watercourse.
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Claude Monet then divided his time between work on nature and work in his studio.
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Claude Monet changed the shape and size of his canvases by moving from rectangular stretchers to square and then circular stretchers.
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Claude Monet continually postponed the Durand-Ruel exhibition until he was satisfied with the works.
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Claude Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.
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Claude Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus, only about fifty people attended the ceremony.
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Claude Monet's paintings produced at Giverny and under the influence of cataracts have been said to create a link between Impressionism and twentieth-century art and modern abstract art, respectively.
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Ellsworth Kelly, following a formative experience at Giverny, paid homage to Claude Monet's works created there with Tableau Vert.
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Claude Monet is the most famous of the Impressionists; as a result of his contributions to the movement, he "exerted a huge influence on late 19th-century art".
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Le Bassin aux Nympheas, known as Japanese Footbridge over the Water-Lily Pond at Giverny, is part of Claude Monet's famed Water Lilies series.
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Under the Nazi regime, both in Germany from 1933 and in German-occupied countries until 1945, Jewish art collectors of Claude Monet were looted by Nazis and their agents.
75.
In 2014, during the spectacular discovery of a hidden trove of art in Munich, a Claude Monet that had belonged to a Jewish retail magnate was found in the suitcase of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers of looted art, Hildebrand Gurlitt.