Monet, Claude Oscar

Monet, Claude Oscar (1840-1926), French painter, leader of the Impressionist movement in France. He was born in Paris, the son of a grocer, and was brought up in Le Havre, in Normandy. There, in his teens, he showed a talent for caricature, and in the mid-1850s he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who encouraged him to take up painting nature in the open air rather than in the studio. Plein-air painting (painting out of doors) later became central to the working methods of Monet and the other Impressionist painters.

After military service in Algeria (1861-1862), Monet went to study in Paris under the academic painter Charles Gleyre, but was more influenced in his increasing preference for the landscapes of Boudin and the Dutch painter Johann Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet met in Paris. Monet’s fellow students at this time included Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille.

In the mid-1860s Monet began his investigations into capturing the transitory effects of light and atmosphere in his paintings, which became central to the Impressionist style. This is evident in his project in 1865 for a large painting (never completed) of figures at a picnic in the forest, the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), following the lead of Manet. Monet began this work on painting trips with Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille to the forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. In 1865 Monet also submitted two views of the Seine to the Salon at his first attempt, but thereafter his work was judged too innovative, and only in the Salon of 1880 was one of his works, a view of ice floes on the Seine, again admitted.

In the late 1860s Monet and Renoir worked together at La Grenouillère, a popular place for boating and bathing on the Seine. There both artists produced works that have become identified as the first true Impressionist paintings. In La Grenouillère (1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Monet used small strokes of pure colour—the hallmark of Impressionism—to convey form and atmosphere. In this way, Monet’s revolutionary works—considered by many to mark the beginning of modern art—were more like sketches than the traditional finished academic painting, in which visible signs of the application of paint were removed.

In the 1870s Monet settled in Argenteuil, near Paris, and the town became the centre of Impressionist painting as other avant-garde artists, such as Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Manet, were invited there by Monet. The group formulated the idea of holding independent exhibitions (later known as the Impressionist exhibitions) of their work, which had been rejected by the artistic establishment. The first was held in Paris in 1874: it was one of Monet’s exhibited works, Impression, Sunrise (1873, Musée Marmottan, Paris), that led critics to coin the derisive term “Impressionists” for the group. Throughout this period Monet continued his study of the changing effect of light on nature, using ever smaller and more varied strokes of contrasting warm and cool pastel colours. The increasing refinement of his technique is illustrated in his depictions of the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris.

In the 1880s Monet undertook several painting trips throughout France, to Normandy, Brittany, and the Mediterranean coast, probably to expand the range and thus the appeal of his art at a time when the fortunes of the Impressionists were declining, as their works had fetched low prices at sales. In the early 1890s he also began several series of canvases depicting certain locations under different light and weather conditions. The most famous of these works are the series of Haystacks (1890-1892), Poplars on the River Epte (1890-1892), and of the façade of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1894). During his visits to his son Michel in London, he also painted a series of views of the Thames, including Waterloo Bridge (1903, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) and Charing Cross Bridge and Westminster (1902, Baltimore Museum of Art). In these and later works, the texture is more dense and the juxtaposition of tiny brushstrokes of colour more complex than in the sketch-like earlier paintings.

In 1883 Monet had moved to a rented house in Giverny, near Paris, which was to be his home until the end of his life. His abiding preoccupation and principal subject matter from the late 1890s onward was the garden at Giverny, in which he built a Japanese-style bridge and created a large pond for exotic water lilies. A series of paintings of the water lily pond (the Nymphéas) were painted in the outdoor studio that Monet created: a number of easels were set up around the pond so that he could view it from different positions—the culmination of his dedication to plein-air painting. From around 1916 to 1921 he also worked on a series of the same subject that forms a continuous band of paintings completely surrounding the viewer; these paintings were donated by the artist to the state and eventually installed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris in 1921; the house and garden at Giverny were opened to the public in 1981.