Works by this Artist
Boulevard des CapucinesClaude Monet, 1873-74 Rouen Cathedral, Façade
Claude Monet, 1894 Garden at Sainte-Adresse
Claude Monet, 1867
Background
bourgeois merchant family
Studies
with Charles Gleyre (1862, Paris) and Johann Barthold Jongkind (Paris)
Career
1862 – meets Frédéric Bazille, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley in Gleyre’s studio
1865 – exhibits Seine Estuary at Honfleur (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA) at Paris Salon
1866 – exhibits Camille (Kunsthalle, Bremen) and Pavé de Chailly (private collection) at the Salon; subsequent entries will be rejected by the Salon jury
1874 – founder-member of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, known at the Impressionists); exhibits in First Impressionist Exhibition (also in Second in 1876, Third in 1877, Fourth in 1879)
1880 – exhibits The Seine at Lavacourt (Dallas Museum of Art) at the Salon; breaks with Impressionist artists
1883 – settles in Giverny
1890s – exhibits at Durand-Ruel’s gallery and Galerie Georges Petit (Paris)
1918 – Monet announces donation of Waterlilies to the French state
Travels
London (1870; 1899; 1901); Venice (1908)
Commissions from
Louis-Joachim Gaudibert; Paul Durand-Ruel; Ernest Hoschedé
Important Artworks
On the Banks of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868 (Art Institute of Chicago)
La Grenouillère, 1869 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Impression, Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan, Paris)
Gare Saint Lazare series, 1877 (for example, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA)
Grainstack series, 1891 (for example, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)
Documentation
In a December 1868 letter written to Frédéric Bazille from Etretat, Monet asked:
“Don’t you think that directly in nature and alone one does better?...I’ve always been of this mind, and what I do under these conditions has always been better. One is too much taken up with what one sees and hears in Paris, however firm one may be, and what I am painting here has at least the merit of not resembling anyone…because it will be simply the expression of what I shall have felt, I myself, personally.”
Cited in Joel Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Plein Air, and Forgetting,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 3 (September 1994): 433.
Web Resources
smarthistory on Kahn Academy: Monet’s Rouen Cathedral Series
Readings
Herbert, Robert. Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994
House, John. Monet, Nature into Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986
Levine, Steven Z. Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: the Modernist Myth of the Self. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994
Levine, Steven Z. "Monet’s Series: Repetition, Obsession,” October, vol. 37 (Summer 1986): 65-75
Seitz, William Chapin. Monet. New York and London H.N. Abrams, 1999
Stuckey, Charles F. Claude Monet: 1840-1926. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995
Tucker, Paul Hayes. Claude Monet: Life and Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995
Images
Monet was born in his parents apartment at 45 rue Lafitte, Paris (9th arrondissement)
In 1860 Monet lived in an apartment at 18 rue Pigalle, Paris (9th arrondissement)
Monet shared an apartment with Bazille and Renoir in 1866-67 at 20 rue Visconti, Paris (6th arrondissement)