Claude Monet

Source

• Born: 14 November 1840
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: 5 December 1926
• Best Known As: Impressionist painter of water lilies

Claude Monet was a founder and central figure of the 19th century art movement known as Impressionism. Early in his career, Monet painted realistic landscapes, but after the 1870s he focused more on the effect of changing light on everyday objects. Often he painted multiple studies of the same subjects, from train stations and haystacks to the London skyline, the Rouen Cathedral and, most famously, water lilies. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) Monet fled from Paris to England, where he formed friendships with Camille Pisarro, Auguste Renoir and other figures central to Impressionism. He returned to Paris at the end of the war, but ended up settling in Giverny, where he began a long series of paintings of haystacks (or grainstacks) during the 1890s. Monet's Impressionistic paintings sold well and his financial success allowed him to purchase property in Giverny, where he built a large garden that became the subject of his series Water Lilies (1906-26). Monet's scenes have since become some of the most recognized paintings in the world. One of his lily paintings sold in 1998 for around $39 million, and in 2007 "Waterloo Bridge, Temps Couvert" sold at auction for more than $35 million.

Monet's painting Impression: Series (1872) is said to be the inspiration for the name of Impressionism... Monet spent two years in the military, in Algiers, before his father agreed to buy him out of his conscripted seven-year service.

(b Paris, 14 Nov 1840; d Giverny, 6 Dec 1926). French painter. He was the leader of the Impressionist movement in France; indeed the movement's name, IMPRESSIONISM, is derived from his Impression, Sunrise (1873; Paris, Mus. Marmottan). Throughout his long career, and especially in his series from the 1890s onwards, he explored the constantly changing quality of light and colour in different atmospheric conditions and at various times of the day.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the seminal figure in the evolution of impressionism, a pivotal style in the development of modern art.

The second half of the 19th century witnessed profound and disrupting shifts within the larger course of Western art. Many artistic attitudes which had prevailed since the beginning of the Renaissance gave way to approaches which differed radically from the practices of the Old Masters. In painting, for instance, illusionism was one of the fundamental Renaissance values: paintings were regarded as windows through which one viewed the natural world. But in the 19th century a new approach gradually replaced the illusionist aim: paintings became increasingly two-dimensional, openly declaring flatness as an intrinsic feature of their identity. They became events in themselves, phenomena to be confronted rather than windows to be seen through.

Impressionism occupies a crucial, yet paradoxical, position in the 19th century's changing interpretation of the painting enterprise. In the hands of Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and others, the new style (it was not called impressionism until 1874) was initially conceived in the spirit of illusionism. As it evolved, however, certain of its tenets emerged as being, in effect, anti-illusionist. Monet's art reveals both the complexities and the paradoxes of this historical phenomenon. In addition, it reveals how impressionism constitutes a turning point in the development of modern art.

Monet was born in Paris on Nov. 14, 1840. In 1845 his family moved to Le Havre, and by the time he was 15 Monet had developed a local reputation as a caricaturist. Through an exhibition of his caricatures in 1858 Monet met Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter who exerted a profound influence on the young artist. Boudin introduced Monet to outdoor painting, an activity which he entered reluctantly but which soon became the basis for his life's work.

By 1859 Monet was determined to pursue an artistic career. He visited Paris and was impressed by the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. Against his parents' wishes, Monet decided to stay in Paris. He worked at the free Académie Suisse, where he met Pissarro, and he frequented the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for Gustave Courbet and other realists who constituted the vanguard of French painting in the 1850s.

Formative Period

Monet's studies were interrupted by military service in Algeria (1860-1862). The remainder of the decade witnessed constant experimentation, travel, and the formation of many important artistic friendships. In 1862 he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre in Paris and met Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Jean Frédéric Bazille. During 1863 and 1864 he periodically worked in the forest at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean François Millet, and Daubigny, as well as with Corot. In Paris in 1869 he frequented the Café Guerbois, where he met Edouard Manet.

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Monet traveled to London, where he met the adventurous and sympathetic dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The following year Monet and his wife, Camille, whom he had married in 1870, settled at Argenteuil, which became a semipermanent home (he continued to travel throughout his life) for the next 6 years.

Monet's constant movements during this period were directly related to his artistic ambitions. The phenomena of natural light, atmosphere, and color captivated his imagination, and he committed himself to an increasingly accurate recording of their enthralling variety. He consciously sought that variety and gradually developed a remarkable sensitivity for the subtle particulars of each landscape he encountered. Paul Cézanne is reported to have said that "Monet is the most prodigious eye since there have been painters."

Relatively few of Monet's canvases from the 1860s have survived. Throughout the decade, and during the 1870s as well, he suffered from extreme financial hardship and frequently destroyed his own paintings rather than have them seized by creditors. A striking example of his early style is the Terrace at the Seaside, Sainte-Adresse (1866). The painting contains a shimmering array of bright, natural colors, eschewing completely the somber browns and blacks of the earlier landscape tradition.

Monet and Impressionism

As William Seitz (1960) wrote, "The landscapes Monet painted at Argenteuil between 1872 and 1877 are his best-known, most popular works, and it was during these years that impressionism most closely approached a group style. Here, often working beside Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte, or Manet, he painted the sparkling impressions of French river life that so delight us today." During these same years Monet exhibited regularly in the impressionist group shows, the first of which took place in 1874. On that occasion his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a hostile newspaper critic to call all the artists "impressionists," and the designation has persisted to the present day.

Monet's paintings from the 1870s reveal the major tenets of the impressionist vision. Along with Impression: Sunrise, Red Boats at Argenteuil (1875) is an outstanding example of the new style. In these paintings impressionism is essentially an illusionist style, albeit one that looks radically different from the landscapes of the Old Masters. The difference resides primarily in the chromatic vibrancy of Monet's canvases. Working directly from nature, he and the impressionists discovered that even the darkest shadows and the gloomiest days contain an infinite variety of colors. To capture the fleeting effects of light and color, however, Monet gradually learned that he had to paint quickly and to employ short brushstrokes loaded with individualized colors. This technique resulted in canvases that were charged with painterly activity; in effect, they denied the even blending of colors and the smooth, enameled surfaces to which most earlier painting had persistently subscribed.

Yet, in spite of these differences, the new style was illusionistically intended; only the interpretation of what illusionism consisted of had changed. For traditional landscape artists illusionism was conditioned first of all by the mind: that is, painters tended to depict the individual phenomena of the natural world - leaves, branches, blades of grass - as they had studied them and conceptualized their existence. Monet, on the other hand, wanted to paint what he saw rather than what he intellectually knew. And he saw not separate leaves, but splashes of constantly changing light and color. According to Seitz, "It is in this context that we must understand his desire to see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who had suddenly gained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patches." In an important sense, then, Monet belongs to the tradition of Renaissance illusionism: in recording the phenomena of the natural world, he simply based his art on perceptual rather than conceptual knowledge.

Works of the 1880s and 1890s

During the 1880s the impressionists began to dissolve as a cohesive group, although individual members continued to see one another and they occasionally worked together. In 1883 Monet moved to Giverny, but he continued to travel - to London, Madrid, and Venice, as well as to favorite sites in his native country. He gradually gained critical and financial success during the late 1880s and the 1890s. This was due primarily to the efforts of Durand-Ruel, who sponsored one-man exhibitions of Monet's work as early as 1883 and who, in 1886, also organized the first large-scale impressionist group show to take place in the United States.

Monet's painting during this period slowly gravitated toward a broader, more expansive and expressive style. In Spring Trees by a Lake (1888) the entire surface vibrates electrically with shimmering light and color. Paradoxically, as his style matured and as he continued to develop the sensitivity of his vision, the strictly illusionistic aspect of his paintings began to disappear. Plastic form dissolved into colored pigment, and three-dimensional space evaporated into a charged, purely optical surface atmosphere. His canvases, although invariably inspired by the visible world, increasingly declared themselves as objects which are, above all, paintings. This quality links Monet's art more closely with modernism than with the Renaissance tradition.

Modernist, too, are the "serial" paintings to which Monet devoted considerable energy during the 1890s. The most celebrated of these series are the haystacks (1891) and the facades of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1894). In these works Monet painted his subjects from more or less the same physical position, allowing only the natural light and atmospheric conditions to vary from picture to picture. That is, he "fixed" the subject matter, treating it like an experimental constant against which changing effects could be measured and recorded. This technique reflects the persistence and devotion with which Monet pursued his study of the visible world. At the same time, the serial works effectively neutralized subject matter per se, implying that paintings could exist without it. In this way his art established an important precedent for the development of abstract painting.

Late Work

Monet's wife died in 1879; in 1892 he married Alice Hoschedé. By 1899 his financial position was secure, and he began work on his famous series of water lily paintings. Water lilies existed in profusion in the artist's exotic gardens at Giverny, and he painted them tirelessly until his death there on Dec. 5, 1926. Still, Monet's late years were by no means easy. During his last two decades he suffered from poor health and had double cataracts; by the 1920s he was virtually blind.

In addition to his physical ailments, Monet struggled desperately with the problems of his art. In 1920 he began work on 12 large canvases (each measuring 14 feet in width) of water lilies, which he planned to give to the state. To complete them, he fought against his own failing eyesight and against the demands of a large-scale mural art for which his own past had hardly prepared him. In effect, the task required him to learn a new kind of painting at the age of 80. The paintings are characterized by a broad, sweeping style; virtually devoid of subject matter, their vast, encompassing spaces are generated almost exclusively by color. Such color spaces were without precedent in Monet's lifetime; moreover, their descendants have appeared in contemporary painting only since the end of World War II.

Further Reading

An excellent monograph on Monet is William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (1960). The most comprehensive survey of Monet's art in relation to impressionism is John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (rev. ed. 1961). A well-written and well-illustrated but less scholarly survey is Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (1967).

For more information on Claude Monet, visit Britannica.com.

Monet, Claude (1840-1926). One of the leading figures of the Impressionist movement, Monet specialized in the representation of light's interaction with formless elements such as water, steam, and mist, or the variations of form created by changes of light, as in the series paintings executed on a single motif (grainstack, poplar, cathedral). His research culminated in the water-lilies executed for the Orangerie Museum, Paris, in which forms are dissolved into shimmering pools of intense, vibrant colour. Initially defended by Zola (Mon salon, 1866, 1868) in the name of Naturalism, Monet's work was seen by the Symbolists as part of a wider, subjective, anti-Naturalist move to transcend logical, utilitarian representations of reality; his series paintings came to be considered as the pictorial realization of Bergson's distinction between duration and spatial time. This link between pictorial technique and intellectual trends informs subsequent literary responses to Impressionist painting, such as the descriptions of Elstir's paintings in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and theories of the material imagination, such as those of Bachelard.

[James Kearns]

As a youth in Le Havre, Monet was encouraged by the marine painter Boudin to paint in the open air, a practice he never forsook. After two years (1860–62) with the army in Algeria, he went to Paris, over parental objections, to study painting. In Paris, Monet formed lasting friendships with the artists who would become the major impressionists, including Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. He and several of his friends painted for a time out-of-doors in the Barbizon district.

Monet soon began to concern himself with his lifelong objective: portraying the variations of light and atmosphere brought on by changes of hour and season. Rather than copy in the Louvre, the traditional practice of young artists, Monet learned from his friends, from the landscape itself, and from the works of his older contemporaries Manet, Corot, and Courbet. Monet's representation of light was based on his knowledge of the laws of optics as well as his own observations of his subjects. He often showed natural color by breaking it down into its different components as a prism does. Eliminating black and gray from his palette, Monet rejected entirely the academic approach to landscape.

In his later works Monet allowed his vision of light to dissolve the real structures of his subjects. To do this he chose simple matter, making several series of studies of the same object at different times of day or year: haystacks, morning views of the Seine, the Gare Saint-Lazare (1876–78), poplars (begun 1890), the Thames, the celebrated group of Rouen Cathedral (1892–94), and the last great lyrical series of water lilies (1899, and 1904–25), painted in his own garden at Giverny (one version, a vast triptych c.1920; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City).

In 1874 Sisley, Morisot, and Monet organized the first impressionist group show, which was ferociously maligned by the critics, who coined the term impressionism after Monet's Impression: Sunrise, 1872 (Mus. Marmottan, Paris). The show failed financially. However, by 1883 Monet had prospered, and he retired from Paris to his home in Giverny. In the last decade of his life Monet, nearly blind, painted a group of large water lily murals (Nymphéas) for the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

Monet's work is particularly well represented in the Louvre, the Marmottan (Paris), the National Gallery (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. It is also included in many famous private collections.

Bibliography

See biographies by W. C. Seitz (1960) and C. M. Mount (1967); Claude Monet: Life and Art (1995) by P. H. Tucker; studies by J. House (1986), D. Skeggs (1987), and M. and J. Guillaud (1989).

A French impressionist (see impressionism) painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is known for his feathery brushstrokes and for the play of light in his paintings. His painting Impression, Sunrise gave the name to the impressionist movement.

Quotes:

"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face."

Not to be confused with Édouard Manet, another painter of the same era.

"Monet" redirects here. For the digital communication method MONET, see Multiwavelength optical networking. For the database management system, see MonetDB.

Claude Oscar Monet
Claude Monet, photo by Nadar, 1899.
Birth name	Claude Oscar Monet
Born	14 November 1840(1840-11-14) Paris, France
Died	5 December 1926 (aged 86) Giverny, France
Nationality	French
Field	Painter
Movement	Impressionism
Works	Impression, Sunrise Rouen Cathedral series London Parliament series Water Lilies Haystacks The Poppy Fields

Claude Monet (French pronunciation: [klod mɔnɛ]) also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926)^[1] was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.^[2] The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Paris 3 Franco-Prussian War, Impressionism, and Argenteuil 4 Gallery of early paintings 5 Later life 6 Giverny 7 Gallery of later paintings 8 Death 9 Posthumous sales 10 See also 11 References 12 External links

Early life

Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. ^[3] He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude.^[3] In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.

On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.^[4]

On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

Paris

On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868. An early example of plein-air impressionism, in which a gestural and suggestive use of oil paint was presented as a finished work of art.

When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Monet, having brought his paints and other tools with him, would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet.

In June 1861 Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for two years of a seven-year commitment, but upon his contracting typhoid his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at a university. It is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at universities, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.

Monet's Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La Femme à la Robe Verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter Doncieux became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean. In 1868, due to financial pressures, Monet attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine.

Franco-Prussian War, Impressionism, and Argenteuil

Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) (1872/1873).

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870), Monet took refuge in England in September 1870.^[5] While there, he studied the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color. In the Spring of 1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition.^[6]

In May 1871 he left London to live in Zaandam,^[6] where he made 25 paintings (and the police suspected him of revolutionary activities).^[7] He also paid a first visit to nearby Amsterdam. In October or November 1871 he returned to France. Monet lived from December 1871 to 1878 at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here he painted some of his best known works. In 1874, he briefly returned to Holland.^[8]

In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism", which he intended as disparagement but which the Impressionists appropriated for themselves. ^[9]

Also in this exhibition was a painting titled 'Boulevard des Capucines', a painting of the street from the photographer Nader's apartment at no. 35. There were, however, two paintings by Monet of the street: one is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the other in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. It has never become clear which painting appeared in the groundbreaking 1874 exhibition, though more recently the Moscow picture has been favoured.^[10]

Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (28 June 1870)^[6] and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they had moved into a house in Argenteuil near the Seine in December 1871. It was during this time that Monet painted various works of modern life in this popular suburb. Camille became ill in 1876. They had a second son, Michel, on 17 March 1878, (Jean was born in 1867). This second child weakened her already fading health. In that same year, he moved to the village of Vétheuil. At the age of thirty-two, Madame Monet died on 5 September 1879 of tuberculosis; Monet painted her on her death bed.^[11][12]

Gallery of early paintings

The Woman in the Green Dress, Camille Doncieux, 1866, Kunsthalle Bremen.	Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1865-1866, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.	Le dejeuner sur lherbe, (right section), with Gustave Courbet, 1865-1866, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.	Flowering Garden at Sainte-Adresse, 1866, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.	Woman in a Garden, 1867, Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Jardin à Sainte-Adresse, 1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City	Seine Basin with Argenteuil, 1872, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.	Jean Monet on his Hobby Horse, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.	The Artist's House at Argenteuil, 1873, The Art Institute of Chicago	Poppies Blooming, 1873, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Madame Monet in a Japanese Costume, 1875, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston	Woman with a Parasol, (Camille and Jean Monet), 1875, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.	Camille Monet at Work, 1875, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA	Argenteuil, 1875, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.	Saint Lazare Train Station, Paris, 1877, The Art Institute of Chicago
Rue Montorgueil, 1878, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.	Camille Monet, on her deathbed, 1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.	Vétheuil in the Fog, 1879, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.	Street near Vétheuil in Winter, 1879	Lavacourt: Sunshine and Snow, 1879-1880 National Gallery, London

Later life

Étienne Clémentel, Claude Monet, in his garden, c. 1917

After several difficult months following the death of Camille on 5 September 1879, a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings.

Camille Monet had become ill with tuberculosis in 1876. Pregnant with her second child she gave birth to Michel Monet in March 1878. In 1878 the Monets temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hoschedé, (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in Vétheuil during the summer. After her husband (Ernest Hoschedé) became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium, in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil; Alice Hoschedé helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children.^[13] They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880 Alice Hoschedé and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vétheuil.^[14] In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny. In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet in 1892.^[4]

Giverny

Port-Goulphar, Belle Île, 1887, Art Gallery of New South Wales

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his large family rented a house and 2 acres (8,100 m²) from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend and the surrounding landscape offered an endless array of suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings. By November 1890 Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. During the 1890s Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building well lit with skylights. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on "series" paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions. His first series exhibited as such was of Haystacks, painted from different points of view and at different times of the day. Fifteen of the paintings were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1891. He later produced several series of paintings including: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Parliament, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies that were painted on his property at Giverny.

Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature: his own gardens in Giverny, with its water lilies, pond, and bridge. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine, producing paintings such as Break-up of the ice on the Seine.

He wrote daily instructions to his gardening staff, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. As Monet's wealth grew, his garden evolved. He remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners.^[15] He built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building, well lit with skylights.

Between 1883 and 1908, Monet traveled to the Mediterranean, where he painted landmarks, landscapes, and seascapes, such as Bordighera. He painted an important series of paintings in Venice, Italy, and in London he painted two important series—views of Parliament and views of Charing Cross Bridge. His second wife Alice died in 1911 and his oldest son Jean, who had married Alice's daughter Blanche, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914.^[4] After his wife died, Blanche looked after and cared for him. It was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts.^[16]

During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. Cataracts formed on Monet's eyes, for which he underwent two operations in 1923. The paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.^[17]

Gallery of later paintings

Hut of the Douaniers with Varengeville, 1882, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam	The Cliffs at Etretat, 1885, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts	Still-Life with Anemones, 1885	The Port Coton Pyramids, 1886	Haystacks, (sunset), 1890-1891, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Poplars, (autumn), 1891, Philadelphia Museum of Art	Four Poplars on the Banks of the Epte River near Giverny, 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art	Rouen Cathedral, Facade (sunset), 1892-1894, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris	Branch of the Seine near Giverny, 1897	Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pappeln on the Epte, 1900, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh	Garden Path, 1902	Houses of Parliament, London, c. 1904, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris	Water Lilies, 1906, Art Institute of Chicago	Water Lilies, 1907, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo
Palace From Mula, Venice, 1908, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.	Water Lilies, 1914-1917, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio	Nympheas, 1915, Neue Pinakothek, Munich	Nympheas, c. 1916, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris	Water Lilies, 1916, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow, 1916-1919	Water Lilies, 1917-1919, Honolulu Academy of Arts	Weeping Willow, 1918-1919, Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth	Sea-Roses (Yellow Nirwana), 1920, The National Gallery, London	Water-Lily Pond, c.1915-1926, Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima, Kagawa, Japan

Death

Water Lilies, 1920-1926, Musée de l'Orangerie

Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.^[18] Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus about fifty people attended the ceremony.^[19]

His famous home and garden with its waterlily pond were bequeathed by his heirs to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966. Through the Fondation Claude Monet, the home and gardens were opened for visit in 1980, following refurbishment.^[20] In addition to souvenirs of Monet and other objects of his life, the home contains his collection of Japanese woodcut prints. The home is one of the two main attractions of Giverny, which hosts tourists from all over the world.

Posthumous sales

Monet, right, in his garden at Vernon, 1922.

In 2004, London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog (Londres, le Parlement, trouée de soleil dans le brouillard) (1904), sold for U.S. $20.1 million.^[21] In 2006, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper providing evidence that these were painted in situ at St Thomas' Hospital over the river Thames.^[22]

Falaises près de Dieppe (Cliffs near Dieppe) has been stolen on two separate occasions. Once in 1998 (in which the museum's curator was convicted of the theft and jailed for five years along with two accomplices) and most recently in August 2007. It has yet to be recovered.^[23]

Monet's Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil, an 1873 painting of a railway bridge spanning the Seine near Paris, was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for a record $ 41.4 million at Christie's auction in New York on 6 May 2008. The previous record for his painting stood at $ 36.5 million.^[24]Le bassin aux nymphéas (from the water lilies series) sold at Christie's 24 June 2008, lot 19,^[25] for £36,500,000 ($71,892,376.34) (hammer price) or £40,921,250 ($80,451,178) with fees, setting a new auction record for the artist.^[26]

Nympheas - Water Lilies sold for GBP £16,500,000 (US $32,670,000). This was one of the highest prices paid for Monet's work.^[27]

See also

• Étretat
• History of painting
• List of works by Claude Monet
• Western painting

References

Cited

1. ^ Biography of Claude Monet giverny.org. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
2. ^ House, John, et al.: Monet in the 20th Century, page 2. Yale University Press, 1998.
3. ^ ^{a b} P. Tucker Claude Monet: Life and Art, p.5
4. ^ ^{a b c} Biography for Claude Monet Guggenheim Collection. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
5. ^ Monet, Claude Nicolas Pioch, www.ibiblio.org, 19 September 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
6. ^ ^{a b c} Charles Stuckey "Monet, a Retrospective", Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 195
7. ^ The texts of seven police reports, written on 2 June – 9 October 1871 are included in Monet in Holland, the catalog of an exhibition in the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum (1986).
8. ^ His paintings are shown and discussed here.
9. ^ Impressionism — Overview ARTinthePICTURE.com. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
10. ^ Kennedy, Ian. "Kansas city or Moscow?", Apollo (magazine), 2007-03-01. Retrieved on 2009-06-08.
11. ^ http://www.artelino.com/articles/la_japonaise.asp accessed 25 September 2007
12. ^ http://members.aol.com/wwjohnston/camille.htm accessed 25 September 2007
13. ^ online biography retrieved 28 December 2007
14. ^ Charles Merrill Mount, Monet a biography, Simon and Schuster publisher, copyright 1966, pp.309-322.
15. ^ "Monet's gardens a draw to Giverny and to his art". Globe Correspondents. 2007-05-20. http://www.boston.com/travel/getaways/europe/articles/2007/05/20/monets_gardens_a_draw_to_giverny_and_to_his_art/. Retrieved on 2008-10-13. 
16. ^ Forge, Andrew, and Gordon, Robert, Monet, page 224. Harry N. Abrams, 1989.
17. ^ Let the light shine in Guardian News, 30 May 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
18. ^ The village of Giverny giverny.org. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
19. ^ P. Tucker Claude Monet: Life and Art, p.224
20. ^ [1]
21. ^ Monet's masterpiece reaches record high bid newsfromrussia.com, 5 November 2004. Retrieved 6 January 2007.
22. ^ Guardian Unlimited
23. ^ "Monet and Others Stolen in Museum Heist in Nice" (Web). artforum.com. 8 August 2007. http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=15630.  Retrieved 8 August 2007
24. ^ Afp.google.com, Monet fetches record price at New York auction
25. ^ "Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas". Christies of London. 2008-06-24. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5100003&CID=5447010003801a. Retrieved on 2008-06-24. 
26. ^ "Monet work auctioned for £40.9m". BBC News. 2008-06-24. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7470832.stm. Retrieved on 2008-06-24. 
27. ^ Auction Result: Monet's Nympheas - Water Lilies

General

• A Monet biography
• Biography at Musee Claude Monet à Giverny
• Biography of Claude Monet
• Monet in Amsterdam
• Tucker, Paul Hayes. Claude Monet: Life and Art. Italy: Amilcare Pizzi. ISBN 0300062982. OCLC 31409541. 
• ed. Richard Kendall, Monet by Himself, (Macdonald & Co 1989, updated Time Warner Books 2004), ISBN 0316728012
• Michael Howard, The Treasures of Monet. (Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris, 2007).
• Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century. (Royal Academy of Arts, London, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Yale University press. 1998).
• Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the '90s. (Museum of Fine Arts in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989).

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Claude Monet

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Claude Monet

• Claude Monet by himself
• Claude Monet paintings, media & interactive timeline
• Claude Monet's cataract
• Comparison of reproductions of Monet
• Life of Monet a timeline of Monet's life
• Monet at Giverny
• Photos of Monet's grave
• The Unknown Monet exhibition - view sketchbooks
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Claude Monet. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

v • d • e Claude Monet Paintings Impression, Sunrise · List of works by Claude Monet Painting series Poplars · Haystacks · London Parliament · Rouen Cathedral · Water Lilies · Mornings on the Seine Movement Impressionism People Camille Doncieux (first wife) · Alice Hoschedé (second wife) · Jacques-François Ochard (teacher) · Eugène Boudin (teacher) · Ernest Hoschedé (patron) · Paul Durand-Ruel (dealer) Places Giverny · Musée de l'Orangerie · Musée d'Orsay · Musée Marmottan Monet

v • d • e Impressionism Originators Frédéric Bazille · Eugène Boudin · Gustave Caillebotte · Mary Cassatt · Paul Cézanne · Edgar Degas · Armand Guillaumin · Édouard Manet · Claude Monet · Berthe Morisot · Camille Pissarro · Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Alfred Sisley Patrons Gustave Caillebotte · Henry O. Havemeyer · Ernest Hoschedé Dealers Paul Durand-Ruel · Georges Petit · Ambroise Vollard Artists in USA Frederick Carl Frieseke · Childe Hassam · Willard Metcalf · Lilla Cabot Perry · Theodore Robinson · John Henry Twachtman · J. Alden Weir Other artists Lovis Corinth · Max Liebermann · Max Slevogt · Konstantin Korovin · Valentin Serov · Francisco Oller y Cestero · Laura Muntz Lyall · Władysław Podkowiński · Nazmi Ziya Güran · Chafik Charobim Other media Music · Literature · French Impressionist Cinema See also Post-Impressionism

Persondata
NAME	Monet, Claude Oscar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Painter
DATE OF BIRTH	14 November 1840(1840-11-14)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris, France
DATE OF DEATH	5 December 1926
PLACE OF DEATH	Giverny, France

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