Claude Monet Essay, Research Paper

Claude Oscar Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. The artistspent most of his childhood in Le Havre. In Le Havre, when he was a teen, he studieddrawing; he also painted seascapes outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boudin. By the 1859, Monet had committed himself to being an artist, and in doing so he tried tospend as much time in Paris as he could possibly get. In the 1860s he became associatedwith the preimpressionist painter Edouard Manet, and with other French painters destinedto form the impressionist school. Painting outside, Monet did simple landscapes and scenes of contemporarymiddle-class society, and started to have success at official exhibitions. But as his styledeveloped, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the appealof direct artistic expression. His experiments with rendering outdoor sunlight with adirect, sketchlike application of bright color became more and more bold, he seemed tocut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional paintersupported by the art establishment. In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to organize their own exhibition, to

appeal directly to the public. They first called themselves independents, but then themedia soon labeled them impressionists, because their work seemed like a firstimpression, and also that because one of his paintings had borne the title Impression:Sunrise. From this time, Monet s compositions are extremely loosely structured, and thecolor was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking had been attempted. Inthe 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique. By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the impressionistschool, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. In 1890 he was ableto purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris. There he beganto construct a water garden-a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung withwillows and clumps of bamboo. Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond and the waterlilies occupied him for the remainder of his life (now open to public). Despite failingeyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5,1926, at Giverny. Some people say that Monet brought the study of the transient effects of naturallight to its most refined expression.