I am a Parisian of Paris. I was born there in 1840, under the reign of the good king Louis-Philippe
which was an epoch centred on business interests and in which the Arts were regarded with real derision.
As it was, my childhood was spent at the Havre where my father had settled in 1845 in order to better
pursue his own business interests and as it happened, this childhood of mine, was essentially one of
freedom. I was born undisciplineable. No one was ever able to make me stick to the rules, not even
in my youngest days. It was at home that I learned most of what I do know. I equated my college
life with that of a prison and I could never resolve to spend my time there, even for four hours
a day when the sun was shinning bright, the sea was so beautiful and it was so good to run along
the cliff-tops in the fresh air or frolic in the sea.
Up until the age of fourteen or fifteen, much to my father's great disappointment, I continued
this very irregular but healthy way of life. Somehow, in between, I did acquire the rudiments of
a basic education including some proficiency at spelling. My studies went no further and did not
cause me too much trouble, as I was able to interweave them with a number of distractions. I
ornamented the margins of my text books, I decorated the blue paper of my exercise books with
ultra fantastic designs and represented in the most irreverant manner possible, the features of
my masters - either drawingtheir faces in front view or in profile.
I became very quickly adept at this game. At fifteen, I was known by the whole of Le Havre as a
caricaturist.
My reputation was so well
established that I was commissioned by everyone for these types of portraits. It was in effect,
in consideration of the sheer number of commissions that I received as well as the insufficiency
of the allowance that I received from my mother, that prompted the audacious decision that I made
to charge a fee for my portraits. This of course, scandalised my family. I would charge ten to
twenty francs depending on whether I liked the look of my clients or not and this method worked
extremely well. In a month, the number of clients had doubled and I was able to charge a fixed
rate of twenty francs without reducing in any way the demand. Had I continued this way, I would
today be a millionaire!
Thus, by this means, I became someone of importance in the town. There, along the shop front of
the only framers in business at Le Havre, were my caricatures, insolently sprawled-out in groups
of five or six, to be seen in full in little gold frames, under glass like real works of art.
Moreover, when I saw strollers gathering to gap at them with admiration and cry "It is so and
so!", I was bursting with pride.
Monet, Claude (b. Nov. 14, 1840, Paris, Fr.--d. Dec. 5, 1926, Giverny)
French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is
regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was
unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression:
Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.
His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted
to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for
painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a friendship
with Pissarro. After two years' military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met
Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye'. He then, in 1862, entered
the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form
the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated
by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée
d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of
it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by
pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet
would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.
