Claude Monet

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a French painter and the central figure of Impressionism. Over six decades he tried to paint not things but the light and air between him and them, from the harbors of Normandy to the water garden he built at Giverny, where he painted Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art), his most searched picture in our catalogue.

Life in brief

Monet was born in Paris and grew up in Le Havre, where he first earned money drawing caricatures. The landscape painter Eugène Boudin persuaded him to paint outdoors, the lesson that shaped everything after. In Paris he studied at the Académie Suisse and then in Charles Gleyre's studio, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. His earliest surviving canvas in our catalogue, Corner of the Studio (1861, Musée d'Orsay), is a dark, careful still life, far from what he would become.

The 1860s were years of ambition and debt. He planned a huge Déjeuner sur l'herbe to rival Manet's, posing his companion Camille Doncieux and friends in the forest of Fontainebleau. He never finished it; he left the canvas as security for unpaid rent, and when he recovered it, damp had damaged it, so he cut it up. Two surviving pieces are in the Musée d'Orsay (The Picnic, two parts; see also the fragment). On the Normandy coast he painted Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (1867) and A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur.

Monet married Camille in 1870 and fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War. On his return the family settled at Argenteuil on the Seine, where he painted some of the happiest pictures of the movement: The Luncheon, Camille Monet on a Garden Bench and The Harbour at Argenteuil.

In 1874 Monet and his friends held their own exhibition outside the official Salon. His Impression, Sunrise (1872) gave the critic Louis Leroy a mocking name for the group, and it stuck. Boulevard des Capucines, a view of crowds from a high window, was also shown. The following years brought Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son (1875), View of the Tuileries Garden (1876), the smoke-filled station of Gare Saint-Lazare: the Train from Normandy (1877) and the flag-filled street of Rue Montorgueil (1878).

Money stayed scarce. The Monets moved to Vétheuil, sharing a house with the family of the bankrupt collector Ernest Hoschedé. Camille died there in September 1879, and Monet painted her on her deathbed in streaks of blue and violet (Camille Monet on Her Deathbed, Musée d'Orsay). That winter the Seine froze and broke up, the subject of Lavacourt in Winter.

In 1883 Monet settled at Giverny with Alice Hoschedé, whom he married in 1892. Sales improved, and he traveled to paint: the cliffs of Étretat (La Manneporte, Rough Sea at Étretat), the Riviera (Palm Trees in Bordighera, 1884) and the Creuse valley in central France (Valley of the Creuse, 1889).

Series painting

From around 1890 Monet worked in series, painting the same motif over and over in different light: haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Thames, Venice. He would carry several canvases outdoors and switch between them as the light changed. Three Poplars, Summer (1891) and Morning Haze (1894) come from this period, and the late Venetian Sunset in Venice (National Museum Cardiff) shows how far he had moved from description toward pure color.

The water garden at Giverny

In 1893 Monet bought land across the road from his house, diverted a stream and created a pond planted with water lilies, crossed by a Japanese-style footbridge. From 1899 it became his main subject. In Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies the green arched bridge spans the top of the canvas, and below it the pond is crowded with lily pads painted in short horizontal dabs, while reflected willows hang as vertical strokes, so the surface is woven from two directions at once. A year later, Water Lily Pond, Harmony in Rose (1900) shows the same view in warmer light. In his last years, with failing eyesight from cataracts, he painted near-abstract canvases such as Weeping Willow and the vast Water Lilies panels he gave to France, installed in the Orangerie in Paris in 1927, months after his death.

Style and technique

Monet worked outdoors, on light-colored grounds, with short, loaded strokes of unmixed color placed side by side. He avoided black, rendering shadow in blues and violets. Look closely at almost any of his paintings and you will find colors you never noticed at a distance: orange in a snowbank, pink in a white dress.

Legacy

Ridiculed in the 1870s, Monet was a national figure by 1900. His late, all-over water lilies were rediscovered in the 1950s by American abstract painters, and he is now among the most popular artists in the world. Browse Famous Monet Paintings and Impressionism.

Where to see his work

The Musée d'Orsay, the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Orangerie in Paris hold the largest groups. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery in London have major holdings, and his house and garden at Giverny are open to visitors.