Claude Monet.

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Claude Monet, French painter, a leading figure in the late-19th-century movement called impressionism. Monet's paintings captured scenes of middle-class life and the ever-changing qualities of sunlight in nature. His technique of applying bright, unmixed colors in quick, short strokes became a hallmark of impressionism.


The son of a successful tradesman in marine supplies, Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. He showed signs of artistic talent as a teenager, drawing skillful caricatures of local personalities. He admired the work of many of the more adventurous artists of his day, landscapists associated with the Barbizon School, such as Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Constant Troyon, and Henri Rousseau. The Barbizon painters promoted landscape painting that stood without reference to historic, religious, or mythological stories, a concept that was then new to French art. Monet also admired French realist artists Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier. The realists depicted members of the working classes, who until then had been considered unworthy subjects for art. Monet received crucial early guidance from two artists who specialized in painting seascapes out-of-doors, Eugène Boudin, a fellow painter from Le Havre, and Dutch artist Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet met in 1862. The unusual viewpoints (scenes shown from above or below), and broad areas of bright color in Japanese woodblock prints also influenced Monet's work.


Monet's formal art training began in 1859 at the Académie Suisse, a studio that provided models for aspiring artists to draw or paint, but gave little direct instruction. Another future leader of the impressionists, Camille Pissarro, was a fellow student there, and the two soon became close friends. After serving briefly in the French military in Algeria, Monet joined a Parisian studio run by Charles Gabriel Gleyre in 1862. Gleyre's studio was essentially student-run. Like the Académie Suisse, it encouraged students to draw from models, rather than from plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues, which was the common teaching method of more conservative academies. In Gleyre's studio Monet met several artists who would become fellow impressionists, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Bazille, who came from a wealthy family, gave Monet regular financial support during the 1860s.


In 1865 Monet had his first works—two ambitious seascapes—accepted by the Salon, a juried art exhibition sponsored annually by the official French Academy of Fine Arts. Thereafter he had a checkered record of acceptance and rejection by the conservative Salon jury, although his works received praise from critics such as French writer Émile Zola and were purchased by discerning and influential buyers.


Monet's canvases from the mid-1860s were massive. The unfinished Luncheon on the Grass, a picnic scene begun in 1865, was originally intended to measure roughly 4.5 m by 6 m (15 ft by 20 ft). For two other large paintings from that time, Monet's future wife Camille Doncieux posed in elegant attire: The Green Dress (1866, Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany), which was shown in the Salon of 1866, and Women in the Garden (1867, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). After the Salon rejected Women in the Garden for its 1867 exhibition, Monet may have reconsidered investing so much effort in a single painting that might not sell, and he began to work on a smaller scale.


In 1869 Monet and Renoir painted a series of landscapes en plein air (outdoors) at a fashionable bathing place, La Grenouillère, on the Seine River near Paris. In these small works, Monet's quick daubs of fresh colors aptly capture the movement of the water and gaiety of the scene.


Despite his father's disapproval, in 1870 Monet married Camille, who had already borne him a son. To escape the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), during which German troops threatened Paris, the couple went to London, then to Holland. They returned in 1872 and settled in Argenteuil, a sailing center on the Seine River outside Paris. Monet painted numerous vibrant, light-filled views of this fast-growing suburban town; he also produced more intimate family studies.

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