Claude Monet

French, 1840 - 1926

(not assigned)Giverny, France, Europe

BiographyFrench landscape painter who exhibited at the Impressionist exhibitions. He was introduced to painting out of doors by Eugène Boudin whom he met in Le Havre in 1856–7. In 1859 he went to Paris where he studied at the Académie Suisse and, after two years' military service in Algiers, joined the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808–74), where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. By 1864 he was working en plein air in Barbizon, a favourite location for landscape painters since the 1840s. Two of his seascapes of the Seine estuary met with some critical success at the Salon of 1865 and for the rest of the 1860s he had a number of works accepted at the Salon (see under Paris). In the summer of 1869 with Renoir he painted views of the bathing resort at La Grenouillère on the river Seine which because of their loose handling, informal compositions, commitment to plein-airisme, and the study of the way in which the colours of objects are affected by their environment, are often regarded as the earliest examples of the Impressionist idiom. Yet La Grenouillère (1869; New York, Met. Mus.) was probably never intended as a finished painting, but was closer to the sketches that landscape painters produced in the open air.

In 1874 Monet participated in what became known as the first Impressionist exhibition, and his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872; Paris, Mus. Marmottan), a loosely painted sketch of an industrial seascape, was mocked by the critic Louis Leroy in Le Charivari and the name was subsequently given to the exhibiting group itself. He exhibited at the Impressionist exhibitions of 1876, 1877, 1879, and 1882. In 1880 he had a work accepted at the Salon, but thereafter depended on dealers' shows to exhibit his work to a wider public. In the 1860s Monet had specialized in scenes of modern life but with his move to Argenteuil in 1871, and to Vétheuil in 1878, he began gradually to distance himself from representing urban or suburban landscapes, favouring those scenes in which references to the contemporary were notably absent. Although the dozen canvases of the Gare St Lazare in Paris, which were begun in 1877, dealt with an important aspect of modern life, the works were shorn of any social comment with which a realist painter might have invested them, and were instead vehicles for the study of changing effects of light and atmosphere. The Arrival of the Normandy Train at the Gare St Lazare (1877; Chicago, Art Inst.) which was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition, displays a refinement of the plein air aesthetic with the dissolving forms broken up by the smoke.

In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny and from the 1890s he enjoyed considerable wealth which allowed him to construct a garden where he painted some of his most ambitious paintings, including over 250 versions of the Waterlilies. In the 1890s, Monet produced a number of paintings done in series. The first series, of the Creuse valley, was shown at a joint exhibition with Rodin at Georges Petit's gallery in Paris in 1889 and this was followed by poplars, grainstacks, and views of Rouen Cathedral. Although each work was intended to capture a very specific atmospheric effect and time of day, taken as a whole the group had the effect of universality and timelessness and any references to the contemporary world were carefully suppressed. Nowhere was this deliberate withdrawal into a perfectly constructed rural utopia more apparent than in the Waterlilies decorative cycle (now in the Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris) which preoccupied Monet during the First World War and was technically unfinished at the time of his death in 1926.

Stevenson, Lesley. "Monet, Claude." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1778 (accessed March 7, 2012).

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