While still in his teens, Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) was selling his charcoal sketches and caricatures to friends and neighbors in Le Havre, France. His excellent draftsmanship drew the attention of resident landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who befriended the young artist and encouraged him to try then-unconventional plein air oil painting. Monet was profoundly affected by its immediacy, and thus began his lifelong fascination with light, color, and capturing on canvas the fleeting sensory perception of nature.
At sixteen, after the death of his mother, Monet lived with an aunt in Paris. There he attended art school and became involved with a circle of artist friends—Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley among them—who would form the core of a new movement. In the group’s first formal exhibition in 1874, Monet’s painting of a misty dawn gave rise to the movement’s name. As Monet put it:
I had sent a thing done in Le Havre, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground. . . . They asked me for a title for the catalogue—it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre—and I said, “Put Impression.” From that came Impressionism, and the jokes blossomed. . . . As for me, I gained as much success as I could have wished, which means I was energetically hooted at by all the critics of the time.
During his formative years as an artist in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Monet synthesized influences ranging from Boudin and the Barbizon school to the experimental paintings of Manet, ultimately creating an innovative style distinctively his own, a prelude to twentieth-century modernism.
Images
- The Beach at Trouville, 1870
- The Red Kerchief, c. 1868–1873
- The Pont Neuf, 1871
- Houses on the Bank of the River Zaan, 1871/1872
- Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1869
- Argenteuil, c. 1872
- The Cradle – Camille with the Artist’s Son Jean, 1867
- Interior, after Dinner, 1868/1869
- Sailboats on the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, 1874
- Camille on the Beach in Trouville, 1870
- Apple Trees in Blossom, 1872
- La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, 1865
- The Basin of Argenteuil, c. 1872
- Farmyard in Normandy, c. 1863
- Regatta at Argenteuil, c. 1872
- Luncheon on the Grass, center panel, 1865–1866
- The Magpie, 1868–1869
- On the Beach at Trouville, 1870–1871
- Luncheon on the Grass, left panel, 1865–1866
- Meditation (Madame Monet on the Sofa), c. 1871
- Still Life with Melon, c. 1872
- The Bridge at Bougival, 1869
- On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868
- View near Rouelles, 1858
- The Landing Stage, 1871
- The Artist’s Son, 1868
- Springtime, c. 1872
- Seascape, Storm, 1866