Modern Age
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
French Impressionism painter.
Claude Monet was the most single-minded of the Impressionists and, in a long life, its last survivor. Raised in the port of Le Havre, he was taught to paint outdoors by the marine painter Eugène Boudin, and he never truly came back inside. In 1872 he painted a hazy sunrise over the harbour and titled it 'Impression, Sunrise'; when a hostile critic seized on the word at the group's first independent exhibition in 1874, he handed the movement its name.
Monet's lifelong subject was not the thing but the light on the thing — the specific weather of a specific minute. To chase it he invented series painting: canvas after canvas of the same haystack, poplar row, or cathedral façade under changing skies, worked in rotation as the sun moved. From 1883 he rented, then bought, a house at Giverny, where he engineered a water garden with a lily pond and a Japanese bridge and spent his last three decades painting its reflections, dissolving the horizon until water, sky, and flowers became a single shimmering field.
By the great late 'Grandes Décorations' of water lilies, Monet was painting nearly blind with cataracts and working at mural scale, and his broken touches had loosened toward something modern painters would recognize as almost abstract. He died at Giverny in 1926, having outlived Impressionism into the age it helped create.
The words the record keeps using: luminous, atmospheric, fleeting, serene, shimmering, immersive.
At a glance
- Lived 1840–1926
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris, Giverny
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Broken color, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- Impression, Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris)
A misty sunrise over the industrial harbour of Le Havre, with an orange sun and its broken reflection almost the only sharp notes in a veil of blue-grey. Shown at the 1874 independent exhibition, its title gave… - Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Monet's wife Camille and their son Jean pause on a breezy rise, seen from below against a fast-moving sky. It is less a portrait than a study of open-air light and wind: the face is shaded and generalized, the moment… - Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
One canvas from the roughly thirty studies of Rouen Cathedral's Gothic façade that Monet painted from rented rooms across the square in 1892–94, each recording a different hour and weather. The stone is barely… - Water Lilies, 1906 (Art Institute of Chicago)
A view straight down onto the lily pond at Giverny, with no bank, no horizon, and no sky except as reflection. The floating pads anchor a surface that is otherwise pure reflected cloud and light. Paintings like this…
What was said
Monet credited the marine painter Eugène Boudin with opening his eyes as a youth in Le Havre, teaching him to observe and to paint directly from nature in the open air — the practice that would define his whole career.
Monet described his aim as capturing the momentary, instantaneous effect of light and atmosphere on the motif, which is why he worked many canvases of the same subject in rotation, following the sun from hour to hour rather than finishing one picture in the studio.
Reviewing the first independent exhibition, the critic Louis Leroy mocked the unfinished look of 'Impression, Sunrise', jeering that a mere impression must be all it was and dubbing the whole group 'the Impressionists' — a sneer the painters adopted as their banner.
Lineage
Learned from Katsushika Hokusai, J.M.W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, Utagawa Hiroshige, Édouard Manet, Kitagawa Utamaro, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Passed on to Wassily Kandinsky
What would Claude make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Claude Monet", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Claude · Keep a life moment the way Claude would · Pictures made after Claude