Claude Monet
() also known as Oscar Claude Monet
or Claude Oscar Monet
(14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) [1] 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. [2] The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise
.
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MONET TICKETS
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Early life
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.
[3] He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised in the local parish church,
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar Claude.
In 1845, his family moved to
Le Havre in
Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
On the first of April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty
francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from
Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of
Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist
Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "
en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.
[4]
On 28 January 1857 his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.
Paris
thumb
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. 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 Marie-Jeanne Lecadre 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
The Woman in the Garden
of the following year, as well as for
On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt
, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter, Cammille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child,
Jean. In 1868, due to financial pressures, Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the
Seine.
Franco-Prussian War, Impressionism, and Argenteuil
thumb (Impression, soleil levant)
(1872/1873).
After the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870), Monet took refuge in England in September 1870.
[5] While there, 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 to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition.
[6]
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).
[7] 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 Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works. In 1874, he briefly returned to Holland.
[8]
In 1872 (or 1873), he painted
Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant)
depicting a
Le Havre 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.
[9]
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.
[10]
Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (28 June 1870)
and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they had moved into a house in
Argenteuil near the
Seine in December 1871. It was during this time that Monet painted various works of modern life in this popular suburb. 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, he 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.
[11] [12]
Gallery of early paintings
Later life
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After several difficult months following the death of Camille on 5 September 1879, a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s, Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings.
Camille Monet had become ill with tuberculosis in 1876. Pregnant with her second child she gave birth to Michel Monet in March 1878. In 1878 the Monets temporarily moved into the home of
Ernest Hoschedé, (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in
Vétheuil during the summer. After her husband (
Ernest Hoschedé) became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium, in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil;
Alice Hoschedé helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children.
[13] They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880, Alice Hoschedé and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vétheuil.
[14] In 1881, all of them moved to
Poissy which Monet hated. In April 1883, from the window of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny. They then moved to
Vernon, then to a house in
Giverny,
Eure, in
Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet in 1892.
Giverny
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, 1887,
Art Gallery of New South Wales
At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his large family rented a house and from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of
Vernon and Gasny at
Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend and the surrounding landscape offered an endless array of suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as his dealer
Paul Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings. By November 1890, Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building well lit with skylights. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of
Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the
Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced several series of paintings including:
Rouen Cathedral,
Poplars,
the
Parliament,
Mornings on the Seine,
and the
Water Lilies
that were painted on his property at Giverny.
Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own gardens in Giverny, with its
water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine, producing paintings such as
Break-up of the ice on the Seine
.
He wrote daily instructions to his gardening staff, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. As Monet's wealth grew, his garden evolved. He remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners.
[15]
Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the
Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, such as
Bordighera
. He painted an important series of paintings in
Venice, Italy, and in London he painted two important series—views of
Parliament and views of Charing Cross Bridge. His second wife, Alice, died in 1911 and his oldest son Jean, who had married Alice's daughter Blanche, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914.
After his wife died, Blanche looked after and cared for him. It was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of
cataracts.
[16]
During
World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer
Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of
Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts: the paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain
ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations, he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.
[17]
Gallery of later paintings
Death
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, 1920-1926,
Musée de l'Orangerie
Monet died of
lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the
Giverny church cemetery.
[18] Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony.
[19]
His famous home, garden and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the
Institut de France) in 1966. Through the
Fondation Claude Monet
, the house and gardens were opened for visit in 1980, following restoration.
[20] In addition to souvenirs of Monet and other objects of his life, the house contains his collection of
Japanese woodcut prints. The house is one of the two main attractions of
Giverny, which hosts tourists from all over the world.
Posthumous sales
thumb, 1922.
In 2004,
London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog (Londres, le Parlement, trouée de soleil dans le brouillard)
(1904), sold for
U.S. $20.1 million.
[21] In 2006, the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society
published a paper providing evidence that these were painted in situ at
St Thomas' Hospital over the river
Thames.
[22]
Falaises près de Dieppe (Cliffs near Dieppe)
has been stolen on two separate occasions. Once in 1998 (in which the museum's curator was convicted of the theft and jailed for five years along with two accomplices) and most recently in August 2007. It has yet to be recovered.
[23]
Monet's
Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil,
an 1873 painting of a
railway bridge spanning the
Seine near Paris, was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for a record $ 41.4 million at
Christie's auction in New York on 6 May 2008. The previous record for his painting stood at $ 36.5 million.
[24]Le bassin aux nymphéas
(from the water lilies series) sold at Christie's 24 June 2008, lot 19,
[25] for £36,500,000 ($71,892,376.34) (hammer price) or £40,921,250 ($80,451,178) with fees, setting a new auction record for the artist.
[26]
Nympheas - Water Lilies
sold for GBP £16,500,000 (US $32,670,000). This was one of the highest prices paid for Monet's work.
[27]
See also
- Étretat
- History of painting
- List of works by Claude Monet
- Western painting
References
- Biography of Claude Monet giverny.org. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- House, John, et al.: ''Monet in the 20th Century'', page 2, Yale University Press, 1998.
- P. Tucker ''Claude Monet: Life and Art'', p. 5
- Biography for Claude Monet Guggenheim Collection. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- Monet, Claude Nicolas Pioch, www.ibiblio.org, 19 September 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- Charles Stuckey "Monet, a Retrospective", Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 195
- The texts of seven police reports, written on 2 June – 9 October 1871 are included in ''Monet in Holland'', the catalog of an exhibition in the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum (1986).
- His paintings are shown and discussed here.
- Impressionism — Overview ARTinthePICTURE.com. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- Kennedy, Ian. "Kansas city or Moscow?", ''Apollo (magazine)'', 2007-03-01. Retrieved on 2009-06-08.
- http://www.artelino.com/articles/la_japonaise.asp accessed 25 September 2007
- http://members.aol.com/wwjohnston/camille.htm accessed 25 September 2007
- online biography retrieved 28 December 2007
- Charles Merrill Mount, ''Monet a biography,'' Simon and Schuster publisher, copyright 1966, pp.309-322.
- Monet's gardens a draw to Giverny and to his art
- Forge, Andrew, and Gordon, Robert, ''Monet'', page 224. Harry N. Abrams, 1989.
- Let the light shine in Guardian News, 30 May 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- The village of Giverny giverny.org. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- P. Tucker ''Claude Monet: Life and Art'', p.224
- [1]
- Monet's masterpiece reaches record high bid newsfromrussia.com, 5 November 2004. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
- Guardian Unlimited
- Monet and Others Stolen in Museum Heist in Nice
- Afp.google.com, Monet fetches record price at New York auction
- Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas
- Monet work auctioned for £40.9m
- Auction Result: Monet's ''Nympheas - Water Lilies''