Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet (b.1840-d.1926) was born in Paris, France. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre. Through the years 1845-1859, Monet grew up in Le Havre, where his father owned a grocery store business. In 1851 Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of Arts. He had also become quite famous locally for his charcoal caricatures. In 1858 he exhibited a painting he had done under the tutelage of Boudin. After he moved to Paris in 1859, the painter Troyon gave him help and advice. He studied at the Academie Suisse in 1860. In 1862, after returning from military service in Algeria, Monet studied at Gleyre's studio in Paris and made friendships with Renoir, Sisley and Bazille, and was influenced by Manet.

He exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1865 and struck a friendship with Manet, Cezanne and Zola. He met Camille Doncieux in the same year and she became his favorite model. In 1868, Claude Monet attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, due to monetary problems. Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux married in 1870. From 1871 to 1878 he lived at Argentueil where he painted some of his best works. In 1872 he painted in Le Havre where he finished the "Impression: Sunrise". Art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism" from this name and it stuck. Monet formed a friendship with Gustave Caillebotte and helped in the founding of a group of artists in 1873. The new group of "Impressionists" held their first exhibition in Paris in 1874.

Monet's first wife Camille died of tuberculosis in 1879. Through the years of 1878-1881, he lived in Vetheuil with his family and with Alice Hoschede and her six children. In the beginning of 1880s, he concentrated on landscape painting. After he finally settled in Giverny in 1883, he made trips and painted in Etretat, Belle-Ile, Antibes, Fresselines and London, where he finished "Thames in Mist". Alice Hoschede became his wife in 1892, after her husband's death. In 1893 he began the creation of his famous garden with lily ponds, which became the source of his most important motifs. His eyesight began to fail since 1908 and he became deeply depressed after the death of his second wife Alice in 1911.

In 1916 he began his famous series of water lily paintings at Giverny. The works themselves were revolutionary, twelve large canvases that required the artist to learn an entirely new style of painting characterized by broad, sweeping strokes. He worked on the paintings exhaustively, despite poor health and double cataracts, until his death in 1926.