Oscar-Claude Monet was the painter who gave Impressionism its name, and the one who stayed with it longest. Born in Paris in 1840 and raised on the Normandy coast, he spent sixty years chasing one idea: that what you are actually looking at is not a haystack or a cathedral but the light falling on it, and that the light will not hold still.
Everything unusual about his career follows from that. The repeated subjects, the outdoor working, the garden he built specifically so he would have something to paint — all of it comes from taking that idea more seriously than anyone else did.
Le Havre, and the man who took him outdoors
The family moved from Paris to Le Havre when Monet was about five, where his father worked in the family's ship-chandling and grocery business. An aunt who painted as an amateur encouraged him, and by his mid-teens he had a small local reputation for charcoal caricatures, which he sold.
The turning point was meeting Eugène Boudin, a Le Havre painter who worked outdoors when almost nobody did. Boudin took him to the coast and made him paint directly from what was in front of him rather than from studies worked up later in a studio. Monet resisted at first and then never really painted any other way. Everything he is known for begins there.
Algeria, and then Paris
In 1861 Monet was conscripted into the Chasseurs d'Afrique and sent to Algeria for what was meant to be seven years of service. He contracted typhoid and left after roughly one year. He made a few sketches, a landscape and some portraits of officers while he was there, and all of them are lost.
If you have read that Monet spent years in Algeria producing some of his most famous work, that is simply untrue. Nothing survives from the period at all.
What did matter came next. In 1862 he entered Charles Gleyre's studio in Paris, and found himself alongside Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. That room, not a school in Le Havre, is where the friendships that produced Impressionism were formed.
The painting that named a movement
The official Salon controlled which artists were seen, and it was not interested in loose, outdoor, unfinished-looking work. So in late 1873 Monet and his circle set up their own exhibiting body, the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, and mounted their own show.
It opened on 15 April 1874 in the photographer Nadar's studio: thirty artists and around 165 works. Among Monet's entries was a hazy view of the harbor at Le Havre called Impression, Sunrise.
On 25 April the critic Louis Leroy published a mocking review in the satirical paper Le Charivari under the heading "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", taking the word from Monet's title and using it as an insult. The artists adopted it. It is one of the few cases in art history where the insult became the official name and the critic is remembered only for coining it.
Argenteuil and the floating studio
Monet married Camille Doncieux in June 1870. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out they left France, first for London and then for Zaandam in the Netherlands, returning in 1871 to settle at Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris.
The Argenteuil years produced some of the most purely enjoyable painting of his life: the river, the sailing boats, the bridges, his own garden. He had a boat converted into a floating studio so he could work from the middle of the water and paint the river at eye level rather than from the bank. It is a small, practical decision that tells you most of what you need to know about how he worked.
Camille
Camille's health declined after the birth of their second son in 1878, and she died on 5 September 1879, probably of uterine cancer. She was thirty-two.
Monet painted her on her deathbed, and later admitted, with something close to horror at himself, that he had found his attention drifting to the colors in her face while he did it. It is one of the most unsettling and honest things any painter has said about their own compulsion.
The winter that followed he painted the Seine at Vétheuil freezing and breaking up — gray water, ice floes, bare trees, mist. They are the bleakest paintings he ever made, and it is not difficult to see why.
Giverny
In April 1883 Monet moved the household to Giverny, a village in Normandy, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He rented the house first and bought it later, once the money was there.
Then he did something unusual for a landscape painter: rather than travel to find subjects, he built one. The garden at Giverny became two gardens — a dense flower garden in front of the house, and, after diverting a stream, a water garden with a pond, willows and the green Japanese-style bridge. He employed gardeners to maintain it and treated the whole thing as an ongoing work. He is often quoted saying his garden was his finest work, and looking at what came out of it, he had a case.
The series paintings
From around 1890 Monet stopped painting a subject once and started painting it repeatedly, working several canvases at a time and switching between them as the light moved.
The grainstacks came first, around twenty-five canvases in 1890 and 1891 of the stacks in a field near his house. Then the poplars. Then, in 1892 to 1894, the west front of Rouen Cathedral, painted from a rented room opposite, in which the stone dissolves into blue, gold and rose depending on the hour. From 1899 he painted London repeatedly — Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, all made possible by the Thames fog he genuinely loved. Later still, Venice.
The point of a series is that no single canvas is the subject. The subject is the difference between them.
The water lilies
The pond at Giverny occupied the last twenty-five years of his life and produced roughly 250 paintings. Over time the horizon disappeared from them, then the bank, then the bridge, until what is left is the water surface itself: reflections of sky and willow, with the lilies floating somewhere between the two.
The largest of these he called his grandes décorations, painted for a room that would surround the viewer entirely. Eight enormous panels were installed in two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris shortly after his death, and the museum opened to the public in May 1927. He worked on them into his eighties, through cataract surgery that changed how he saw color, and he died at Giverny on 5 December 1926.
Monet's family, since the internet keeps getting it wrong
Monet had two children, both with Camille: Jean, born in 1867, and Michel, born in 1878.
After Ernest Hoschedé's bankruptcy in 1877, Alice Hoschedé and her six children moved in with the Monets, and the two households never separated again. Monet married Alice in 1892, after Ernest's death. Her six — Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jacques and Jean-Pierre — were his stepchildren, not his children. Blanche later married Monet's son Jean and cared for Monet in his final years.
Where to see his work
The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris holds the largest collection in the world, close to 100 canvases, much of it inherited from Michel Monet. It is also where Impression, Sunrise hangs.
The Musée d'Orsay has the major Impressionist holdings, the Musée de l'Orangerie has the water lily rooms, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a substantial collection including grainstacks and views of the Japanese bridge. The house and gardens at Giverny are open to visitors for most of the year.
What his paintings sell for
Rarely, and for a great deal. In May 2019 one of the 1890 grainstack paintings, Meules, sold at Sotheby's in New York for $110.7 million — a record for Monet and the first Impressionist work to pass $100 million at auction.
Most of what he painted is in public collections and will never come up for sale at all.
What a painter can take from him
Three things, and none of them require talent to try.
Paint the light, not the object. Monet's advice was to forget what you know you are looking at and put down the colors and shapes you actually see. It sounds like mysticism and it is really just a discipline.
We do not sell Monet kits, and Monet as paint by numbers explains why the two things do not fit together.
Paint the same thing twice. The second version of anything teaches you more than the first two different subjects would.
Work outdoors if you can. Light in a room is stable, which is convenient and also the reason studio landscapes so often look inert.
If you would like to spend a few evenings with a landscape without having to draw one first, our paint by numbers kits hand you the composition and the palette and leave you the painting. Several of them are Impressionist in spirit — light on water, gardens, weather — and our piece on the water lilies looks at that series in more detail.
