Claude Monet: The Painter Who Gave Impressionism Its Name

A Boy from Le Havre

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but he grew up on the coast of Normandy. When he was about five, his family moved to the port city of Le Havre, where his father worked in the family grocery and ship-supply business. The father hoped his son would join the trade. Young Claude had other plans: he filled his school notebooks with drawings and, as a teenager, became known around town for his caricatures of local people. He sold them for 10 to 20 francs each and displayed them in the window of a frame shop.

That shop window changed his life. It also showed the seascapes of Eugène Boudin, a local painter who worked outdoors, directly in front of the sky and the sea. Boudin noticed the gifted caricaturist and persuaded him to come along on painting trips. Working outside, Monet later said, was like a veil being torn away: he suddenly understood what painting could be. The idea of capturing the changing weather and light on the spot, rather than inventing a landscape in the studio, stayed at the centre of his art for the rest of his life.

Paris, the Army and a Circle of Friends

In 1859 Monet moved to Paris. Instead of entering the official École des Beaux-Arts, he studied at the Académie Suisse, an informal studio where artists could draw from a model for a small fee. There he met Camille Pissarro, who became a lifelong friend.

In 1861 Monet was called up for military service and sent to Algeria with a cavalry regiment. The bright North African light made a strong impression on him, but he fell ill with typhoid. His aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, paid to release him from the army on the condition that he complete a proper art course. Back in Paris, he entered the studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre in 1862. The teaching interested him less than the students he met there: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. Together they rejected the polished historical scenes favoured by the art establishment and went out to paint the forest of Fontainebleau and the Normandy coast. The Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet met around the same time, also taught him much about loose, quick brushwork and fleeting effects of weather.

Early Success and Hard Years

In the 1860s the most important place for a French artist to be seen was the Salon, the large official exhibition in Paris chosen by a jury. Monet had two seascapes accepted in 1865, and in 1866 he scored a real success with a life-size portrait of a young woman in a striped green silk dress. The model was Camille Doncieux, who became his companion and later his wife. Critics, including the young writer Émile Zola, praised the painting.

Success did not last. Monet's large outdoor figure painting Women in the Garden was rejected by the Salon jury in 1867, and the jury often turned him down in the following years too. In 1867 Camille gave birth to their son Jean. Money was so short that Monet sometimes could not buy paint, and he depended on loans from friends such as Bazille. Even so, these were productive years. He painted snowy landscapes in Normandy such as The Magpie, bright scenes on the beach at Trouville, and boating places on the Seine, painting side by side with Renoir at La Grenouillère in 1869. In these works his brushstrokes became broken and quick, and his shadows filled with colour instead of brown and black.

London and the Birth of Impressionism

Monet and Camille married in June 1870. A month later the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Monet left for London to avoid being drafted. There he studied the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable and painted the Thames wrapped in fog. Most importantly, he met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who began buying his paintings and later became one of the main champions of the whole Impressionist group. After a stay in the Netherlands, Monet returned to France and settled at Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine near Paris, where he lived until 1878.

In 1872, on a visit to Le Havre, he painted the harbour at dawn: an orange sun, its reflection on the water, small dark boats and a haze of blue and grey. He gave it the simple title Impression, Sunrise. Tired of the Salon's rejections, Monet and his friends organised their own independent exhibition, which opened in April 1874 in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. About thirty artists took part, including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot. The critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review in the satirical paper Le Charivari, using the title of Monet's harbour scene to call the whole group "Impressionists". The insult stuck, and the artists eventually adopted the name themselves.

Life at Argenteuil and Vétheuil

The Argenteuil years are among the sunniest in Monet's work. He painted sailboats, bridges, poppy fields and his family in the garden. A floating studio boat allowed him to work directly on the river. In 1875 he painted Camille and Jean on a windy hillside in Woman with a Parasol, and in 1876 he showed Camille in a brilliant red kimono in La Japonaise, a sign of the fashion for Japanese art that was sweeping Paris. In 1877 he set up his easel inside the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station in Paris and painted a dozen views of steam, glass and iron, an early example of the series method he would later make famous.

Money troubles returned. One of his main collectors, the department-store businessman Ernest Hoschedé, went bankrupt in 1877–1878. In 1878 the Monets and the Hoschedé family, Ernest's wife Alice and her six children, came to share a house at Vétheuil on the Seine. Camille gave birth to a second son, Michel, in 1878, but her health was failing. She died in September 1879 at the age of 32. Monet painted her one last time on her deathbed, later admitting that even in his grief he caught himself studying the colours of her face. Alice Hoschedé stayed and raised both families' children with him; the couple married in 1892, after Ernest's death.

Giverny and the Series Paintings

In 1883 Monet rented a house with a large garden in the village of Giverny, about 75 kilometres from Paris. By the end of the 1880s his paintings were finally selling well, thanks largely to Durand-Ruel's exhibitions in Paris and the United States. In 1890 he bought the house.

From Giverny, Monet developed his most original method: painting the same subject many times at different hours, seasons and kinds of weather. Each canvas recorded one particular moment of light. He worked on several canvases at once, switching from one to the next as the light changed. The best-known series include:

• Haystacks (1890–1891): stacks of grain in a field near his house, painted in summer heat, autumn haze and winter frost.
• Poplars (1891): rows of trees along the river Epte, reflected in the water.
• Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894): more than thirty views of the cathedral's Gothic front, painted from rooms opposite it, in which the stone seems to dissolve into coloured light.
• Mornings on the Seine (1896–1897) and views of the Houses of Parliament in London (1900–1905).

When the Haystacks were shown in Paris in 1891, they sold quickly. The series idea influenced many later artists, who began to see a painting less as a picture of a thing and more as a record of how it looks at one moment.

The Water Garden and the Water Lilies

In 1893 Monet bought land across the road from his house and created a pond fed by a branch of the river Epte. He planted water lilies, weeping willows and irises and built a footbridge in the Japanese style. He employed gardeners to keep everything exactly as he wanted it; one of them reportedly had the task of keeping the lily pads clean. The garden became his main subject for the last 25 years of his life. He painted about 250 pictures of the water lilies, the Nymphéas, focusing more and more on the surface of the water itself, with its reflected sky, clouds and trees, often without any horizon or shoreline.

His later years brought heavy losses. Alice died in 1911, and his son Jean died in 1914. Monet's eyesight was damaged by cataracts, which made colours look dull and yellowish to him; the reds and browns of some late paintings may reflect this. In 1923 he had an operation on one eye, which improved his sight. Throughout this time he was cared for by Blanche Hoschedé, Alice's daughter and Jean's widow, who was a painter herself.

The Grand Decorations and Monet's Legacy

During the First World War, Monet built a huge new studio at Giverny to work on enormous water lily panels. After the armistice of 1918 he offered a set of them to the French state as a monument to peace, encouraged by his close friend, the prime minister Georges Clemenceau. These Grandes Décorations were installed in two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where visitors are surrounded by water and light on all sides. Monet did not live to see them displayed: he died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, at the age of 86, and the rooms opened to the public in 1927. At his funeral, Clemenceau is said to have removed the black cloth from the coffin and replaced it with a flowered fabric, saying that black was not for Monet.

Monet's influence reached far beyond Impressionism. His loose brushwork, bright colour and attention to light changed how artists looked at the world. In the mid-20th century, abstract painters in the United States rediscovered his huge late water lilies, which seemed to anticipate their own large canvases filled with colour. Today his paintings are among the most valuable in the world: in 2019 one of his Haystacks sold at auction for more than 110 million US dollars. His house and gardens at Giverny are open to visitors, and the largest collection of his work is held by the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which also owns Impression, Sunrise.

Little-Known Facts About Monet

• He was baptised Oscar-Claude, and as a child his family called him simply Oscar.
• He was often confused with the painter Édouard Manet, whose name differs by only one letter. Manet was at first annoyed by this, but the two later became friends, and Manet painted Monet working in his studio boat.
• Monet collected more than 200 Japanese woodblock prints, by artists such as Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro. Many still hang in his house at Giverny.
• He sometimes destroyed paintings he was unhappy with; he is known to have slashed or burned canvases, even shortly before exhibitions.
• His friend Paul Cézanne is often quoted as saying that Monet was "only an eye, but what an eye!"