by G E Barr

Created on: June 10, 2010

Claude Monet was born talented.  He had within him the urge and the ability to paint brilliantly.  But it was Camille, The Woman In The Green Dress who brought him recognition.  Camille Doncieux, was his model and future wife.  She bore him two sons and it was the second pregnancy which weakened her already frail health.  Married in 1870, Claude's Camille died in 1879.  He painted her on her death bed.

Monet called his paintings Impressions.   And while other artists with whom he studied in Paris were copying paintings by the old masters, Monet himself was painting his "impressions".  He was catching moments in time, in his own style, rather than concerning himself with form and material angles.  He was capturing light and it's effects on nature.

He was born, November 14, 1840 in Paris, France.  His family moved to Normandy in 1845 when Monet was a young boy and his father hoped to train him to become a grocer.  However, Monet wanted to be an artist.  His mother was a singer and may have made a creative impression upon the boy.  During his maturation, Monet became less and less impressed with academia and often criticized the art schools of the day.  This caused problems with his family who wanted him to enter an art school and achieve some sort of certification as an educated person.  He was a very independent thinker, and this did not set well with some.

By the time Monet was 12 years old, he was already known for his charcoal sketches which he sold for what amounted to pennies.  When he was seventeen, he met Eugène Boudin on the beaches of Normandy and it was Boudin who taught him to use oil paints.  His mother also died when he was seventeen and he would go to live with an aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

It was Monet's aunt who worked to get him out of a stint in the army, when he became ill, and only if he agreed to attend painting school.  Which he did.  It was in 1862, that Monet, disillusioned with contemporary art schools of the day, met and was tutored by Charles Gleyre in Paris and befriended Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.  The four artists shared techniques and further improved en plein air and painting with quick strokes and broken color, calling it Impressionism.

In 1869, he and Renoir painted a floating restaurant in Bougival, called, La Grenouillere.  Broadly displaying Impressionism.

In his 1872 painting/Impression, Sunrise, one is immediately drawn to the play of color upon the water and the quick, ingeniuous strokes.

Monet was a collector of Japanese prints and his fondness for the asian influence is portrayed in Giverny, France at his water garden, which is still there and open for tour.

Claude Monet died in December of 1926.  Having left his impressions of light upon subject and the beautiful simplicity of quick strokes, for those who appreciate such things.  His life held disillusionment, heartache and emotional turmoil due to the loss of some of those whom he loved.  As well as his demanding nature and lack of appreciation for organized academic art.  Still yet, he produced brilliant pieces of art over the course of his life.

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