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Claude Monet (
14 November 1840 --
5 December 1926) was a founder of
French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting
Impression, Sunrise (
Impression, soleil levant).
When
Monet traveled to
Paris to visit the
Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters.
Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw.[citation needed] Monet was in Paris for several years and met other young painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists; among them was
Édouard Manet.
In June 1861, Monet joined the
First Regiment of African
Light Cavalry in
Algeria for a seven-year commitment, but, two years later, after he had contracted typhoid fever, his aunt intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at an art school. It is possible that the
Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in
1862 Monet became a student of
Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Frédéric Bazille and
Alfred Sisley.
Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.
Monet's
Camille or
The Woman in the
Green Dress (
La femme à la robe verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his future wife,
Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in
Women in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the
Bank of the
Seine,
Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Camille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child,
Jean in 1867.After the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War (19 July
1870), Monet took refuge in
England in September 1870, where he studied the works of
John Constable and
Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color
. In the spring of
1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation for inclusion in the
Royal Academy exhibition.
In May 1871, he left
London to live in
Zaandam, in the
Netherlands, where he made twenty-five paintings (and the police suspected him of revolutionary activities).
He also paid a first visit to nearby
Amsterdam. In October or November 1871, he returned to
France. Monet lived from December 1871 to 1878 at
Argenteuil, a village on the right bank of the
Seine river near Paris, and a popular Sunday-outing destination for Parisians, where he painted some of his best known works. In 1874, he briefly returned to
Holland.
In 1872, he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) depicting a
Le Havre port landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the
Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. From the painting's title, art critic
Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended as disparagement but which the
Impressionists appropriated for themselves. Also in this exhibition was a painting titled
Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard done from the photographer
Nadar's apartment at no. 35. There were, however, two paintings by Monet of the boulevard: one is now in the
Pushkin Museum in
Moscow, the other in the
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
Kansas City. It has never become clear which painting appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, though more recently the Moscow picture has been favoured.
Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (28 June 1870) and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they had moved to Argenteuil, in December 1871. It was during this time that Monet painted various works of modern life. Camille became ill in 1876. They had a second son,
Michel, on 17 March 1878, (Jean was born in 1867). This second child weakened her already fading health. In that same year, Monet moved to the village of
Vétheuil. On
5 September 1879,
Camille Monet died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two; Monet painted her on her death bed.
The
Great Artists -
The Impressionists – Monet
- published: 18 Mar 2016
- views: 7447