CLAUDE MONET
(1840-1926)

For more information on Monet, please visit the following sites:
          www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/ (Web Museum)
          www.maag.org/us/ (American Art Museum Giverny)

Oscar-Claude Monet, although born in Paris, spent much of his childhood in the coastal city of Le Havre. There, he first met and then studied with the influential seascape painter Eugène Boudin (1824 - 98). His earliest works were caricatures, views of Le Havre, and some landscapes and seascapes. In 1860 Monet enrolled in the Académie Suisse in Paris, where he probably met the painter Camille Pissarro, but the following year he was drafted into the French army and was sent to Algeria. The onset of an illness forced Monet to return home to Le Havre in 1862. After receiving an honorable discharge later that year, he returned to Paris and his career as an artist. In Paris, at the art school of Charles Gleyre, Monet met other like-minded young artists, among them Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, the core of the group that would come to be called the Impressionists.

In the 1860s, Monet painted subjects generally associated with the early Impressionists: scenes of family and friends gathered indoors or on country outings and views of Paris streets and parks. Increasingly, Monet used a broken brushwork that, along with bright colors, would become hallmarks of the Impressionist style. In 1870 Monet married Camille Doncieux. Because of the Franco-Prussian War, Monet and his new wife fled to London. When they returned to Paris two years later, Monet continued painting scenes of the city and pleasure spots along the River Seine. Around this time, the picture dealer Paul Durand-Ruel forged an important relationship with Monet as well as Monet's artist friends and colleagues. In April 1874, at the historic first exhibition of Monet and his artistic circle, an art critic used the title of Monet's picture Impression, Sunrise to describe the artist's work in general. Not long after, the term was used to label the group of young artists and their artistic style.

In 1877 financial difficulties forced the Monets to rent a house with their friends Ernest and Alice Hoschedé and their six children. The birth of the Monet's second son, Michel in 1878 was followed by the tragic death of Camille in 1879. After moving to Poissy, Monet, his sons, and the Hoschedé finally moved in 1883 to Giverny, a small hamlet near the Seine between Bennecourt and Vernon where the families rented a house and small property. Monet was then forty-three years old; he would remain at Giverny for another forty-three years. In the 1880s, Monet painted the River Seine, the countryside near Vétheuil and Giverny, and the French seacoast at Fécamp and Étretat. In 1890, after he purchased the property at Giverny, Monet began to work on his famed water garden. Following Ernest Hoschedé's death in 1891, Alice and Monet married the following year. Incidentally, a week after Monet's marriage, Suzanne Hoschedé and the Columbus-born painter Theodore Butler married, and the young couple took up residence nearby.

The 1890s were a time of great success for Monet, especially due to his series paintings of haystacks, poplar trees, and the famed façade of Rouen Cathedral. Increasingly, Monet turned his attention to his gardens at Giverny, the water garden with its water lilies and wisteria-covered Japanese bridge. Following the death of Alice Monet in 1911 and the death of Monet's first son, Jean, in 1914, Monet's stepdaughter, Blanche, moved to Giverny to take care of her step-father-in-law. He constructed a larger studio on his property, worked on various views of his gardens, and more and more devoted himself to painting a series of large canvases murals of water lilies. Following the end of World War I, he offered these to the French government, and they eventually were installed in a specially designed oval room at the museum of the Orangerie in Paris. Monet, who had been troubled by cataracts in both eyes for years, was nearly blind by 1923 and underwent several surgeries. Although the results were never entirely successful, Monet continued to work on his water lily murals with passion. Monet also contracted lung cancer and died on December 5, 1926. He was buried in a simple ceremony in the Giverny cemetery. Six months after his death, his Water Lilies murals were installed at the Orangerie and opened to the public on May 20, 1927.

Michel Monet, the artist's surviving son, inherited his father's estate, including the property at Giverny and, of course, the contents of its studio. Michel chose to live elsewhere, but he allowed Blanche Hoschedé-Monet to continue living at Giverny until her death in 1947, when the stewardship of the property was taken up by her brother Jean-Pierre Hoschedé. Following Michel Monet's death in 1966, the contents of the studio - dozens of magnificent late paintings left neglected since the master's death - were willed to the French government and, in 1971 were presented publicly at the Musée Marmottan in Paris. The home and gardens at Giverny, which had languished for many years, were brilliantly restored and opened to the public in May 1980.