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Who was Claude Monet? What style did he master? What did he do during his life? Read on to find out!
Background information Claude Monet
After a short apprenticeship at the Académie Suisse in Paris, Claude Monet mainly by studying the work of the artists of the Barbizon school, the Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, William Turner and John Constable. In 1872 he painted his famous painting "Impression, soleil levant".
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Claude Monet - Eponym for Impressionism
Born in Paris on November 14, 1840, the son of a merchant grew up in Le Havre. His artistic talent was first expressed in drawing caricatures.
In 1856 he met the painter Eugène Boudin, who is considered a forerunner of the Impressionists with his seascapes and coastal paintings in which he attempted to capture atmospheric moods. Boudin inspired the young Monet to art in general and in particular to plein air painting, painting in the open air.
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The work of Charles-François Daubigny, a representative of the School ofBarbizon, the artists who captured impressions of nature in their paintings in the Fontainebleau forest and along the Seine, also had an early influence on Monet.
In 1859 Monet enrolled at the private Académie Suisse in Paris, where he also met Camille Pissarro. In 1861 and 1862 he did his military service in Algeria, where the light and colours of the south made a lasting impression on him.
After his return he entered the studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, who taught in Paris and included Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley students were.
Claude Monet - Self-portrait
Important for Monet's artistic development was his friendship with the Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, who lived and worked in Paris. But during these years, Monet continued his landscape studies in the Fontainebleau forest with like-minded people.
In 1870, Monet was married to his longtime mistress Camille Doncieux and mother of his child. Monet went to London with his young family and studied the paintings of John Constable and William Turner, especially his depictions of landscape motifs in mist. In London he also came into contact with the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would later buy many of Monet's works.
At the end of 1871, Monet moved to Argenteuil and rented a house in this town on the Seine west of Paris. There he painted his most famous painting, "Impression, soleil levant",
In 1883 Monet moved to Giverny, where he- only interrupted by a few trips - lived in his house with garden and lily pond until his death on December 6, 1926.
"Impression, soleil levant''
This was the response of Claude Monet when asked about the title of his 1872 painting in Argenteuil, a view of Le Havre harbor barely distinguishable in the haze and dim morning light.
Monet's painting was shown in Paris in 1874 at the first of a total of eight exhibitions of the artists around Monet, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas, for whom thecritics coined the derisive name "Impressionists", which would eventually give name to a highly successful and respected style of painting.
Against the judgment of the Academy and the École des Beaux-Arts, which honored the primacy of the contouring line, the Impressionists turned to a painting of light and colour that captured the subject in its immediate appearance.
Painter Claude Monet - Autumn in Argenteuil
The interest in shaping their sensations and feelings led the "painters of modern life", as the writer Chalres Baudelaire characterized them, to increasingly abandon the representational form, both in landscape representations and in representations of Parisian urban life.
Monet - A founder of serial art
Monet concentrated in his works on the perception of colour phenomena in nature and their changes in light. He used the technique of short brushstrokes, which allowed him to depict the fleeting play of light with juxtaposedplaced colours.
In an attempt to capture the changing effects of light, he painted one and the same motif at different times of the day in his paintings, which can be seen as a series. Whether photographs of Saint-Lazare station in Paris (1876/77), the hayloft (1889-1893) or Rouen Cathedral (1892-1894), the subject always disappears behind the capture of the pictorial motif in its momentary appearance in the light.
This approach of using a motif over and over again made Monet the founder of serial art, which created manygrinding would be practiced by artists such as Andy Warhol.
Monet's Water Lilies
For the last 25 years of his career, water lilies were the predominant motif in Claude Monet's paintings. In the garden of his house in Giverny, the painter had created a water lily pond, which he expanded to considerable proportions over the years.
After a longer break in his creative work, mainly caused by the death of his second wife Alice, Monet - partly encouraged by his friend, the politician Georges Clemenceau - began to paint intensively again around 1914.
The artist, who was then almost seventy-five years old and had suffered eye operations, now continued with great verve his great project: the water lily paintings, painted on huge canvases, consisting of several parts and filling an entire room, some of which had been in the rooms of the Orangerie in Paris since 1921, which had been specially redesigned for this purpose.
Monet devoted himself to the motif in countless paintings. Large format sketches were made outside, in nature, during the summer months. Monet worked on it continuously in the studio during the winter. At that, his gaze focused, as in"Water Lilies - Yellow Nirvana" (around 1920), more and more on the water surface with the plants floating on it and the reflections of the clouds.
Painter C. Monet - Water Lilies
Small-scale juxtapositions of colour tones in vibrant virtuoso brushstrokes occupy the picture plane. This seems to become identical with the surface of the water, but at the same time asserts itself as its own reality, namely that of the painting.
With his late works, Monet distanced himself from the impressionism of his early years and approached abstract painting - as did Wassily Kandinsky, one of the foundersof abstraction, without becoming unfaithful to his credo to always paint from nature.
