Claude Monet Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Training
Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840 and grew up in the port city of Le Havre, where the light off the English Channel and the bustle of ships first stirred his visual curiosity. His father, Adolphe Monet, hoped he would join the family business, while his mother, Louise-Justine, encouraged his artistic leanings. As a teenager he drew and sold caricatures, but the decisive turn came when the landscape painter Eugene Boudin urged him to paint outdoors, directly before nature. Boudin, and later the Dutch-born painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, taught him to attend to fleeting weather and shifting light, foundations of the approach that would later be called Impressionism.

Monet visited Paris as a young man, studying informally at the Academie Suisse, where he encountered Camille Pissarro. After a period of military service in Algeria beginning in 1861, he fell ill and returned to France; family help enabled him to resume his art studies. In 1862 he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille. The four became a close circle, painting from life and rejecting academic formulas. Encounters with Edouard Manet, whose modern subjects and bold handling had shocked the Salon public, deepened Monet's resolve to depict contemporary life with fresh eyes.

Finding a Direction
Monet's early Salon showings brought both frustration and promise. He achieved notice with works such as the portrait of Camille Doncieux (La Femme a la robe verte, 1866), yet repeated rejections and financial hardship were constant pressures. His partnership with Camille Doncieux, whom he married in 1870, provided companionship and artistic inspiration; their first son, Jean, was born in 1867. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 drove the couple to London, where Monet studied the atmospheric landscapes of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. In London he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become the most steadfast champion of the Impressionists, purchasing works when few others would.

Returning to France in 1871, Monet settled in Argenteuil, a suburban town along the Seine. There he painted regattas, riverside promenades, and the new leisure of a modernizing society. Friends including Renoir, Manet, and Sisley visited to paint alongside him. The emphasis on painting outdoors, capturing transient effects with quick, broken brushwork and high-key color, cohered during these years.

The Birth of Impressionism
Frustrated with the annual state-run Salon, Monet joined with Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and others to organize an independent exhibition in 1874. Monet showed a small view of Le Havre entitled Impression, Sunrise (1872). The critic Louis Leroy, mocking the loose style and apparent incompletion, labeled the group "Impressionists", a term they adopted despite the intended derision. Monet exhibited with the group in several subsequent shows, and continued to refine his method: painting the same motif at different hours and in varied weather to study the changing envelope of light.

Family Hardship and Supportive Allies
Though artistically pivotal, the 1870s and early 1880s were financially precarious. Durand-Ruel's purchases and exhibitions, including important shows in Paris and later in New York, eventually created a market for Monet's work. Patrons such as Ernest Hoschede offered support, and writers like Stephane Mallarme and the collector-physician Georges de Bellio advocated for the Impressionists. The painter and patron Gustave Caillebotte helped organize group exhibitions and provided direct aid to friends.

Monet's personal life was marked by both joy and loss. He and Camille had a second son, Michel, in 1878. The family moved to Vetheuil, sharing a household with the Hoschede family during a period of financial strain. Camille died in 1879, a devastating blow that appears across the somber canvases of that time. In the following years Monet formed a lasting partnership with Alice Hoschede; after the death of Ernest Hoschede, Monet and Alice married in 1892, bringing together their children in a blended household.

Giverny and the Garden as Studio
In 1883 Monet settled in Giverny, a village northwest of Paris that would become inseparable from his art. He rented and later purchased a house with grounds that he transformed over decades into an ever-evolving garden, with flower beds carefully orchestrated for color and season. By diverting a nearby stream, he created a water garden with a pond of lilies and a Japanese-style bridge. This living laboratory let him study reflections, veils of mist, and shifting tones across hours and seasons. The garden was both subject and instrument: a stage Monet directed to explore perception itself.

Series Paintings and International Recognition
From the late 1880s onward, Monet developed ambitious series, painting the same motif under different light conditions and at varied times of day. The Haystacks (1890, 1891) tested how color depends upon atmosphere. The Poplars along the Epte, the Rouen Cathedral facades (1892, 1894), and the Thames views of London's Parliament and Waterloo Bridge (1899, 1901) turned repetition into revelation, inviting viewers to see that constancy of subject coexists with ceaseless change in light. Later he painted in Venice (1908), translating palaces and lagoons into shimmering webs of color.

Durand-Ruel's exhibitions, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, and growing enthusiasm among American collectors, expanded Monet's reputation and stabilized his finances. Fellow artists and friends, among them Renoir, Pissarro, and Morisot, remained part of his orbit, while figures such as the statesman Georges Clemenceau admired his tenacity and became close companions in his later years.

Water Lilies and Late Work
Beginning in the 1890s and continuing for three decades, Monet made the water garden at Giverny the focus of his art. The Nympheas, or Water Lilies, grew from easel paintings into vast mural cycles. He explored reflection and depth without a classical horizon, immersing viewers in surfaces that dissolve edges and redefine space as layered color and light. As his ambition expanded, so did the scale of his canvases, some stretching across entire walls.

Monet's eyesight began to fail around 1912 due to cataracts, which altered his color perception. He persisted, often working outdoors with large canvases, adjusting his palette to what he could see, and later undergoing surgery that partially restored his vision. Throughout, Alice Hoschede managed the complex household at Giverny and protected his working rhythm; after her death in 1911, his family, including his son Michel and stepchildren, continued their support. Clemenceau encouraged Monet during the First World War and afterward, and he championed the idea that the monumental Water Lilies would serve as a gift to France. Monet worked obsessively on the Grandes Decorations, a suite of immersive panels conceived for a specific architectural setting.

Final Years and Legacy
Monet died at Giverny on 5 December 1926. At his funeral, Clemenceau, a loyal friend, rejected conventional mourning symbols, insisting that Monet's farewell honor the artist of light and color. Soon after, the Grandes Decorations were installed at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, where the oval rooms offer an enveloping experience of sky, water, and vegetation. Other key holdings of his work can be found at the Musee d'Orsay and the Musee Marmottan Monet, which houses Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave a movement its name.

Monet's legacy rests not only on beloved images of cathedrals, haystacks, poplars, and gardens, but on a radical rethinking of how painting can register time and perception. By committing to painting en plein air, working in series, and trusting sensation as the foundation of form, he helped lead modern painting away from narrative and toward the phenomenology of seeing. The friendships and rivalries of his circle, the steadfast backing of Durand-Ruel, the companionship of Camille Doncieux and later Alice Hoschede, and the encouragement of allies like Renoir, Pissarro, Manet, Mallarme, Caillebotte, and Clemenceau shaped a career that weathered poverty, grief, and doubt to become a cornerstone of modern art. His garden at Giverny, tended for decades and preserved after his death, remains a living reminder that for Monet nature was both muse and measure, a mirror in which the world and the eye transform each other.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Claude, under the main topics: Art - Nature - Failure.

Other people realated to Claude: Georges Clemenceau (Leader), Tadao Ando (Architect), Paul Cezanne (Artist), Frederick C. Frieseke (Painter), Mary Cassatt (Artist), Wassily Kandinsky (Artist), Eugene Delacroix (Artist), Pierre Bonnard (Artist), Octave Mirbeau (Writer), Paul Signac (Artist)