Claude Monet

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Claude Monet was born on the 14th of November 1840, on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte in Paris, and died on the 5th of December 1926, having spent the final two decades of his life painting the same lily pond in his garden at Giverny. Between those two dates he produced a body of work so vast that, as the art historian Daniel Wildenstein put it, its ambition and diversity challenge our understanding of its importance. The movement he founded took its name from a single painting he made in 1872, a hazy harbor view of Le Havre called Impression, Sunrise. A hostile critic seized on the title to mock the group, and the word stuck. What began as an insult became the name of one of the most influential movements in the history of Western art. How did a boy who sold caricatures on the streets of Le Havre for pocket money become the painter whose water lily canvases would be rediscovered by the Abstract Expressionists half a century after his death? And what did it cost him to get there?

• 2. Algeria and the Education of a Painter

  ›

  On the 2nd of March 1861, the twenty-year-old Monet was conscripted in Le Havre. His family could have paid 2,500 francs for a substitute, but Monet refused and enlisted instead for seven years with the 1st Regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique. He crossed Algeria to join his regiment at Mustapha in June 1861, having never been further from Normandy than Paris and having never ridden a horse. In the spring of 1862 he contracted typhoid fever, and his aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre paid 3,025 francs to secure his discharge.

  The Algerian episode left a mark he carried for the rest of his life. He later told his friend Gustave Geffroy that the light and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the gem of my future researches" and that the experience "put some lead in my head." Before Algeria, the painter who would make light the central subject of his entire career had simply never confronted light of that intensity. While recuperating at Sainte-Adresse in the summer of 1862, he met the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind near Cap de la Heve, and together Jongkind and Eugène Boudin became the decisive early mentors who pushed him toward outdoor painting. His discharge came on the 21st of November 1862, and within weeks he was in Paris enrolling in Charles Gleyre's studio.

• 3. The Birth of Impressionism

  ›

  When the Salon repeatedly closed its doors to Monet and his peers, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Degas, and Berthe Morisot organized an independent exhibition under the deliberately bland name the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. The title was chosen to avoid association with any style. At the first exhibition, in 1874, Monet showed Impression, Sunrise, The Luncheon, and Boulevard des Capucines among others. The art critic Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review in which he seized on the harbor painting's title to coin the word Impressionism as a taunt. He would later regret it, concluding they were a group whose majority had nothing impressionist.

  The exhibition was open to anyone who paid 60 francs, and total attendance reached roughly 3,500. Monet priced Impression, Sunrise at 1,000 francs and failed to sell it. A more sympathetic critic, Louis Edmond Duranty, called their approach a revolution in painting. For the third exhibition, on the 5th of April 1877, Monet chose seven paintings from the dozen he had made of the Gare Saint-Lazare in the previous three months. Critics praised the way he captured the arrivals and departures of the trains and the way smoke and steam altered colour and visibility. Monet's last appearance in the Impressionist exhibitions was in 1882, four years before the group's final show.

• 4. Grief and Financial Ruin

  ›

  Camille Doncieux, who had modelled for Monet beginning around 1865 and given birth to their first son Jean in 1867, was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1878, the year their second son Michel was born. She died in 1879. Monet made a study in oils of her dead face, and many years afterward confessed to Georges Clemenceau that his compulsion to analyse colour was both a joy and a torment. He explained: "I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife's dead face and just systematically noting the colours according to an automatic reflex."

  His patron Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store owner who had commissioned four paintings, went bankrupt around the same time and left for Paris. The Impressionists were falling out of fashion. Creditors pursued Monet with such persistence that he sometimes had to flee his own house to avoid them. When his landlady at Vétheuil refused to extend his tenancy, he moved with Alice Hoschedé and her children to Poissy in December 1881. In January 1883 he wrote letters to Alice expressing a desire to die. The spring of that year brought one concrete anchor: on the 29th of April 1883, Monet moved into a rented house in Giverny near Vernon, and Alice arrived the following day.

• 5. Giverny and the Series Paintings

  ›

  Two days after Monet settled at Giverny in 1883, word arrived that Edouard Manet had died. Having no money for train fare or mourning attire, Monet had to petition his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for the necessary funds. Within a few years his fortunes reversed. By 1890 he had purchased the Giverny house, built a greenhouse and a second studio lit by skylights, hired seven gardeners, and wrote daily planting instructions to his head gardener with the precision of an architect. White water lilies native to France were planted alongside imported cultivars from South America and Egypt, producing yellow, blue, and white varieties that turned pink with age. In 1902 he enlarged the water garden by nearly 4,000 square metres, and the pond was enlarged again in 1901 and in 1910.

  Dissatisfaction with the limits of a single-moment canvas pushed Monet toward his great series method: painting the same subject dozens of times under different conditions of light, weather, and season, sometimes working on as many as eight canvases in a single session, spending roughly an hour on each. In 1891, fifteen paintings of haystacks were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1892 he produced twenty-six views of Rouen Cathedral; in 1895 he exhibited twenty of them, their subject being not the medieval masonry but the play of light and shadow across its surface at different hours. The 1898 showing at the Petit Gallery included 61 paintings. On the 6th of May 1909, the exhibition Les Nymphéas opened, comprising 48 canvases from 1903 to 1908, and the critic Claude Roger-Marx wrote that Monet had reached the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination joined to the real.

• 6. Failing Sight and the Water Lilies

  ›

  Alice Monet died in 1911, and Monet's oldest son Jean died in 1914, leaving him in the care of Alice's daughter Blanche. It was during this period that the first signs of cataracts appeared. In 1913, Monet traveled to London to consult the German ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich, received new glasses, and refused surgery for his right eye. As his sight deteriorated, his broad strokes grew broader and his palette shifted toward red and yellow tones. He began labelling his tubes of paint, maintained a strict order on his palette, and wore a straw hat to reduce glare.

  He eventually underwent cataract surgery in 1923. He suffered persistent distortion of colour vision afterward, and the corrective spectacles proved difficult. Upon receiving tinted Zeiss lenses he was enthusiastic, though his left eye ultimately had to be covered by a black lens entirely. By 1925 his vision had improved enough that he began retouching earlier works, painting the water lilies bluer than before. The series he produced in this period would fill 27 large panels in the Musée de l'Orangerie, installed in May 1927, five months after his death on the 5th of December 1926 at the age of 86. Attendance at that first Orangerie showing was sparse. It was only in the 1950s, when the Abstract Expressionists rediscovered the late canvases, and a 1952 essay by André Masson helped shift critical perception, that the works found the audience they deserved.

• 7. Afterlife of a Legacy

  ›

  Monet had insisted that his funeral be simple, and only about fifty people attended. Clemenceau was among them. Looking at the black cloth draped over the coffin, he pulled it off and said: "No black for Monet!" He replaced it with a cloth patterned with flowers. The house, garden, and water lily pond were bequeathed by Michel Monet to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1966, and following restoration the Fondation Claude Monet opened the property to visitors in 1980.

  The paintings themselves scattered widely and accrued extraordinary value. In 2004, London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog sold for US $20.1 million. On the 6th of May 2008, Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil, an 1873 railway-bridge painting, was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder at Christie's New York for a record $41.4 million. A few weeks later, on the 24th of June 2008, Le bassin aux nymphéas sold at Christie's London for £40,921,250, nearly doubling the artist's own record and placing the sale among the top 20 highest prices ever paid for a painting at that time. Several works were also looted under the Nazi regime from Jewish collectors; Bord de Mer, seized after the Anschluss in 1938, was only restored to the Parlagi family's granddaughters in 2024.