Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a French painter and the leading figure of Impressionism, a movement that took its name from one of his canvases. Working mostly outdoors in northern France, he tried to record what the eye actually sees as light and weather change, and in later life he painted the same subjects, above all the water-lily pond in his garden at Giverny, again and again. His late, almost abstract work made him an important bridge between 19th-century painting and modern art.

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, and in 1845 the family moved to Le Havre on the Normandy coast. His father, a merchant, wanted him to join the family business, but his mother supported his wish to paint. Around 1858 he met the painter Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to painting in the open air.

He went to Paris in 1859 and studied at the Académie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro. Drafted in 1861, he served with the Chasseurs d'Afrique in Algeria until typhoid sent him home in 1862,. He later said the light and colour of North Africa had planted the seed of his later work. Back in Paris he joined the studio of Charles Gleyre and befriended Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.

Monet had some success at the official Salon in 1865, but his later entries were mostly rejected. In 1867 his partner Camille Doncieux gave birth to their son Jean, and his father cut off support. They married in June 1870, just before the Franco-Prussian War, and the family went to London and the Netherlands to avoid conscription. In London he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his chief seller.

From 1871 Monet lived at Argenteuil on the Seine near Paris, painting the river, sometimes from a sailboat. In 1874 he and fellow artists, among them Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Berthe Morisot, staged their own exhibition independent of the Salon. A hostile critic, Louis Leroy, seized on Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a hazy view of Le Havre harbour, and mocked the group as Impressionists. The label stuck. Monet exhibited with the group until 1882.

Camille fell seriously ill after the birth of their second son, Michel, in 1878 and died the following year at Vétheuil, where the family shared a house with the art patron Ernest Hoschedé and his wife Alice. Monet was badly in debt. In April 1883 he settled at Giverny, near Vernon on the route between Paris and Normandy, with Alice and the children; the two married in 1892. Growing sales, including in the United States, ended his money troubles, and in 1890 he bought the house.

From around 1890 Monet painted series of single subjects in changing light: haystacks, poplars and the façade of Rouen Cathedral. Between 1899 and 1901 he made repeated stays at the Savoy Hotel in London, painting the Thames bridges and the Houses of Parliament in fog. In 1908 he spent three months in Venice.

At Giverny he created an elaborate garden and enlarged a pond filled with water lilies, crossed by a Japanese-style bridge. From 1899 to the end of his life he painted it constantly, making more than 250 water-lily pictures. During the First World War Monet, encouraged by his friend Georges Clemenceau, began a cycle of huge water-lily panels for the French state. Cataracts dimmed and distorted his colour sense, and he finally accepted surgery in 1923.

Monet died of lung cancer at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged 86. In 1927 the great water-lily panels were installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, but they drew little interest at first. After the Second World War the Abstract Expressionists rediscovered the late work, and Monet came to be seen as a forerunner of abstract art. He is now the best known of the Impressionists.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show France during Monet's Impressionist years and the 1914 and 1920 maps frame his late Giverny period around the First World War.