b. 1840, Paris; d. 1926, Giverny, France
Oscar-Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris. He spent his childhood in the Normandy
coastal town of Le Havre, where his father prospered as a grocer and ship chandler. In 1860 Monet
met the landscape artist Eug¸ne Boudin, who introduced him to plein-air painting, and he began to
produce increasingly ambitious and naturalistic work.
In 1859 Monet moved to Paris, where he attended the Acadˇmie Suisse beginning in 1860. He returned
to Le Havre in 1862 and worked in the plein-air mode alongside Boudin and Dutch painter Johan
Barthold Jongkind. In 1862 he returned to Paris to enroll in the studio of Charles Gleyre, where
his fellow students included Frˇdˇric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Despite some success in 1865,
when two of his works were exhibited at the Salon, by 1867 financial difficulties forced Monet to
return to his family in Le Havre, leaving his pregnant companion, Camille-Lˇonie Doncieux, in Paris,
where she gave birth to their first son, Jean. The couple were married in 1870; soon after, in
response to the Franco-Prussian War, they left for London. There Monet met Paul Durand-Ruel, who
would later become his gallerist and a champion of Impressionism [more]. After returning to France
at the end of 1871 Monet and his family settled in Argenteuil.
In 1874, having banded together with other artists to form the Sociˇtˇ Anonyme des Artistes, Monet
submitted his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musˇe Marmottan, Paris) to the group's first
exhibition. The work caused a sensation, and gave a name to the burgeoning movement, when the
critic Louis Leroy lampooned the group as Ņimpressionists,Ó a term the artists themselves soon
adopted without satirical inflection.
In 1878, with financial troubles looming and his wife gravely ill, the Monets embarked on an
unorthodox joint household arrangement in Vˇtheuil with the family of former patron Ernest Hoschedˇ.
After CamilleÕs death, Monet and Alice Hoschedˇ continued to live together, waiting until Ernest
Hoschedˇ died before marrying in 1892. Monet continued to exhibit with the Impressionists on an
irregular basis, choosing also to show his work at the Salon in 1880, in a solo exhibition at
Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883, and at several of Georges PetitÕs Expositions Internationales
de Peinture. In 1889 Galerie Georges Petit staged a major retrospective of his work, showing 145
paintings. Two years later Durand-Ruel mounted an exhibition of Monet's first series paintings,
Grainstacks, which were met with great critical acclaim. The artist continued his exploration of
series in his paintings of poplars and of the Rouen Cathedral, documenting in a succession of
canvases subtle shifts in light or focus.
By 1890 Monet was financially secure enough to purchase a house at Giverny, later adding adjacent
land and installing both the water-lily garden and Japanese bridge, which he would later famously
paint in series. Between 1899 and 1901 he made three trips to London to paint views of the Thames
River. Over the next decade he completed more series studies of the lily garden at Giverny, which
he continued to enlarge. AliceÕs death in 1911 was succeeded by that of his elder son in 1914.
The following year Monet began work on an expansive new garden studio, in which he would fabricate
his Grandes-Dˇcorations, the large-scale water-lily series that would occupy him until his death.
He made plans to turn a large number of these works over to the state to be housed in specially
built galleries in the Paris Orangerie. The installation of twenty-two paintings opened to the
public in May 1927, five months after his death, at the age of eighty-six.
