In 1873 Monet painted Impression: Sunrise, an atypical work that he exhibited with others at the first exhibition of impressionist art in 1874, an exhibition that was independent of the government-sanctioned Salon that had previously rejected the work of Monet and his fellow exhibitors. Returning to France, he rented a house in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, where he resided until 1878. In 1870 he married Camille and, because of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), left France for London, where he met Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), who later became his dealer. Nonetheless, he continued painting, producing among other works the celebrated Terrace at Sainte-Adresse (1867). Personal problems, including poverty and the pregnancy of his mistress Camille-Léonie Doncieux, plagued Monet during the late 1860s. Perhaps stimulated by the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann (1809–1891) in the 1850s and 1860s, Monet began to take an interest in urban life and he painted three cityscapes in 1867, including The Church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Meanwhile he failed to complete a huge Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which exists today only in fragments.Īfter 1868, his submissions to the Salon were rejected. That year he debuted at the Salon with two works, The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur and the Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide, and he subsequently exhibited at the Salons of 18. With painting excursions to the Forest of Fontainebleau and Honfleur behind him, Monet moved to Paris in 1865. Accordingly, most of Monet's works in these early years were landscapes and seascapes, many of which were painted out-of-doors, and they demonstrated an interest in light and its impact on the perception of objects. He spent the summer of 1862 at Sainte-Adresse painting with Boudin, and there he encountered the Dutch landscape artist Johan-Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891), who together with Boudin had a decisive influence on Monet's career. Following a brief period of military service, Monet studied with the academic painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874) and met, among other artists, Frédéric Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. After his mother's death in 1857, Monet went to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Suisse and encountered other young artists like Camille Pissarro. Local renown as a caricaturist brought him the attention of the landscape painter Eugéne Boudin (1824–1898) in the mid-1850s, and it was Boudin who introduced Monet to outdoor landscape painting. monet before impressionismĬlaude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but he spent much of his early life in Le Havre and along the Normandy coast. Source: Letter from Monet to Evan Charteris, 21 June 1926 (Wildenstein 2626), quoted in: John House, "Monet: The Last Impressionist?" In Monet in the Twentieth Century, edited by Paul Hayes Tucker and others. My only virtue is to have painted directly in front of nature, while trying to render the impressions made on me by the most fleeting effects." In 1926, the last year of his life, Monet looked back on his career as an artist and commented in a letter to Evan Charteris: "I have always had a horror of theories…. Although an ardent proponent of impressionism, Monet had a larger and more complex career, and his corpus of approximately two thousand paintings reveals an artist whose lifework evolved through three major phases, each with its own distinctive character. These artists painted out-of-doors, contended that they were not painting objective reality, but momentary perceptions of light reflected from objects under constantly changing climatic conditions, and painted scenes of "modern life" in contemporary France. Radical in both their techniques of painting and their choice of subject matter, Monet and his impressionist companions like Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) exhibited at eight independent exhibits between 18. MONET, CLAUDE (1840–1926), French painter.Ĭlaude Monet is arguably the best known of the impressionists, a group of largely French artists who challenged conventions in painting that had developed since the Renaissance and that laid the foundations for modern trends in the arts. MONET, CLAUDE monet before impressionism the years of impressionism monet after the impressionist decade interpretations of monet bibliography