Claude Monet was born Oscar-Claude Monet on November 14, 1840, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, the second son of Claude-Adolphe Monet, a grocer, and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet. He died on December 5, 1926, in Giverny, at the age of 86, having spent the last thirty years of his life building a garden and painting it. Between those two dates he produced over 2,500 paintings and became the painter most closely identified with Impressionism — the movement whose name derives directly from one of his works.
Childhood and Early Talent: Le Havre
When Monet was five, his family moved from Paris to Le Havre on the Normandy coast, where his father joined a chandler’s business. The move suited Monet. He loved the beaches, the cliffs, the sea light — the kind of outdoor existence that would define his working life for the next eighty years. He played truant from school regularly. He drew compulsively.
His early artistic talent was for caricature — pointed, witty, saleable. By his mid-teens he was producing caricatures of local celebrities and selling them at the local picture framer’s shop for 10 to 20 francs each, signing them “Oscar” (his first name). Monet’s first success as an artist came when he was 15, with the sale of caricatures that were carefully observed and well drawn. It was at this same shop that he encountered the painter who would change everything.
Eugène Boudin was a landscape painter working in the then-uncommon practice of painting outdoors — en plein air. He recognized something in the teenage caricaturist and offered him painting lessons. Monet was initially reluctant; caricature was where his confidence lay. Boudin insisted, took him outside, and showed him what it looked like to paint directly from nature rather than from memory or from the studio. The experience was, by Monet’s own later account, a revelation. Boudin introduced the somewhat arrogant student to the practice of painting in the open air. The experience set the direction for Monet, who for more than 60 years would concentrate on visible phenomena and on the innovation of effective methods to transform perception.
Paris, Military Service, and Gleyre’s Studio
In 1859 Monet traveled to Paris to study, enrolling briefly at the Académie Suisse. His family wanted him to enter formal academic training; he resisted. In 1861, he was drafted into military service and sent to Algeria for two years — an experience that exposed him to the intense Mediterranean light and color that he later credited as a formative influence. He contracted typhoid and was sent home. A family arrangement bought him out of the remaining service.
Back in Paris in 1862, he entered the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre — not because he admired academic painting, but because Gleyre’s studio was where serious young painters went. Among his classmates were Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. The four became close friends and the nucleus around which Impressionism would eventually crystallize.
Gleyre’s teaching did not impress Monet. What did impress him was the company, the arguments about painting, and the shared expeditions to the Fontainebleau forest outside Paris, where the Barbizon painters had established a tradition of painting directly from nature. Monet, Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley took this practice further than the Barbizon painters had — not just sketching outdoors but completing large-scale canvases in the open air. Critics and the public found this bizarre and unconventional.
The 1860s: Struggle, Camille, and Early Recognition
The 1860s were years of financial difficulty punctuated by occasional recognition. The Salon — the official annual exhibition that controlled access to the French art market — accepted some of Monet’s work and rejected others. His large-scale Women in the Garden (1866), painted entirely outdoors, was rejected; the rejection stung and pushed him toward the idea of an independent exhibition outside the Salon’s control.
During this period he met Camille Doncieux, who became his model, companion, and in 1870, his wife. She appears in some of his most important early paintings, including La Femme en robe verte (1866), a full-length portrait that attracted favorable attention at the Salon and briefly stabilized his finances.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Monet fled to London with Camille and their young son Jean. In London he encountered the work of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable in local museums. Turner’s use of light profoundly influenced Monet’s art. He also met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become the most important commercial supporter of Impressionism and whose faith in the movement’s painters during years of public hostility made its eventual success possible.
Impressionism: The Movement and the Name
After the war, Monet settled in Argenteuil, west of Paris on the Seine, and entered the most productive collaborative period of his life. The group of painters who would become known as the Impressionists — Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot — held their first independent exhibition in Paris in April 1874. It was a deliberate act of defiance against the Salon system.
Monet contributed several works, including Impression, Sunrise (1872), a loose, rapidly executed view of the port of Le Havre in early morning mist, orange sunlight reflected in the water. The critic Louis Leroy reviewed the exhibition in the satirical magazine Le Charivari and seized on the title of Monet’s painting to ridicule the entire group: “Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it.” The insult became the movement’s name. The Impressionists adopted it.
Personal Loss and the Series Paintings
Camille’s health deteriorated during her second pregnancy in the late 1870s. Their second son Michel was born in 1878. She died the following year, 1879, at 32. Monet painted her on her deathbed — a haunting, heavily brushed canvas of her pale face — and described the experience with characteristic self-criticism: he had found himself analyzing the colors of her dying face rather than simply grieving. He was horrified by his own painter’s instinct.
Through the 1880s, Monet traveled extensively — Normandy, Brittany, the Mediterranean coast, London, Venice — painting directly from nature in all conditions. He developed his characteristic method of working in series: returning to the same subject repeatedly at different times of day and in different weather conditions, accumulating a body of work that documented how light transformed the appearance of things. The Haystacks series (1890–91), the Rouen Cathedral series (1892–94), and the Poplars series (1891) are the major examples. The haystacks, mundane agricultural objects, became vehicles for an investigation of light so thorough that the object itself nearly dissolved into atmosphere.
Giverny: The Garden as Subject
In 1883 Monet rented a house in the village of Giverny, in the Seine valley between Paris and the Normandy coast. In 1890, when his finances had improved enough, he bought it. He spent the next decades transforming the property into the garden that became his primary subject for the rest of his life: a flower garden in the Normandy tradition near the house, and a water garden — created by diverting a stream, building a Japanese-style wooden bridge, and planting water lilies — that provided the material for approximately 250 paintings.
“My finest masterpiece,” Monet later said, “is my garden.” He maintained it with an army of gardeners and planned it with the same deliberateness he brought to his paintings — both were investigations of the same problem, how color and form dissolve in light.
His second wife Alice Hoschedé died in 1911. His son Jean died in 1914. These losses coincided with the diagnosis of cataracts in both eyes, which began impairing his vision seriously from around 1912.
The Water Lilies and the Cataracts
He was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes in 1912 at the age of 72. Nuclear cataracts absorb light, desaturate colors, and make the world appear more reddish yellow. Consistent with these perceptual changes, Monet’s paintings at this time became more abstract, with a notable color shift from the blue-green spectrum to muddier yellows, pinks, and reds.
He was terrified by what was happening to his vision and resisted surgery for years. He continued painting through deteriorating sight, producing work that critics of the time considered chaotic and formless and that later generations recognized as a bridge between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. In 1908, a show of his work in Paris had to be postponed after he took a knife to at least 15 of his water lily canvases. His friend Georges Clémenceau, the former Prime Minister of France, later said: “Monet would attack his canvases when he was angry. And his anger was born of a dissatisfaction with his work.”
In 1923, he finally submitted to cataract surgery on his right eye, underwent three operations, and was left with distorted color perception that troubled him deeply for the remaining years of his life. After surgery he destroyed or reworked many of the canvases painted at the height of his vision loss.
The great project of his final years was the monumental Grandes Décorations — a series of large water lily panels intended as a gift to the French nation. The idea had been encouraged by Clémenceau, and Monet formally promised the panels to France on November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice. Twenty-two of his water-lily canvases were installed at the Orangerie in Paris in 1927, the year after his death, in two specially designed oval rooms. They remain there today, and the experience of standing in those rooms — surrounded on all sides by water and light and no horizon — is unlike anything else in Western art.
Death and Legacy
Monet died on December 5, 1926, at his home in Giverny. He was 86. He had worked until near the end, refusing to fully stop despite near-blindness, despite age, despite the war that had taken so many of his contemporaries. He had written to a friend toward the end: “My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.” He did not destroy them. They now hang in virtually every major museum in the world.
Monet remained committed to the Impressionist style throughout his life, even as Fauvism, Cubism, and abstract painting emerged before his death in 1926. He was not temperamentally a revolutionary. He was an observer — one of the most sustained and disciplined observers in the history of painting — and his subject, from the beaches of Le Havre at fifteen to the lily pond at Giverny at eighty-six, was always the same thing: light, and what it does to the world when it touches it.
Key Facts
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Born | November 14, 1840, Paris |
| Died | December 5, 1926, Giverny |
| Movement | Impressionism |
| Spouses | Camille Doncieux (1870–1879); Alice Hoschedé (1892–1911) |
| Children | Jean Monet, Michel Monet |
| Major series | Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, Thames, Water Lilies |
| Key works | Impression, Sunrise (1872); La Grenouillère (1869); Water Lilies (~250 paintings, 1896–1926) |
| Home and studio | Giverny, Normandy (now the Fondation Claude Monet) |
| Paintings produced | Over 2,500 |
| Water Lilies at the Orangerie | 22 panels installed 1927, still in situ |
