CLAUDE MONET - FOUNDER OF IMPRESSIONISM
Claud Monet´s early years:
Oscar-Claude Monet was born 14. November 1840 in Paris. He got married to Camille, and together they got two sons, Jean and Michael.
When Monet was five years old, the family moved to Normandy. His dream was to become an artist, and in 1851 he entered Le Havre secondary school of arts, thought that his father wanted him to go to business school and go into the family's ship-chandling and grocery company. His desire for art was most likely from his other, who was a singer and had a career in art.
His love for art and painting:
Monet earned about ten to twenty francs from what the locals knew him for, charcoal caricatures. He took drawing lessons from Jacques-Francoius Orchard, and on the beaches of Normandy, he met fellow artist Eugéne Boudin, who became his mentor in oil paints.
Louvre in Paris was always a priority visit, and he could witness painters copying from the old masters, but Monet would instead go alone and sit by a window and paint what he saw.
Impressionism
The late part of 1873, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley organized the "Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers" to exhibit their artworks independently. Together they held exhibitions with their work. Monet was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet.
The year right after they made their organization, Monet painted the famous artwork "Impression, Sunrise". This painting gave its name to the style and artistic movement. Louis Leroy, a critic, said in his review about this painting; "L'Exposition des Impressionnistes", Which appeared in "Le Charivari", coined the term "Impressionism". It was intended as a disparagement, but the Impressionists appropriated the term for themselves.
In 1874 they held their first exhibition in Paris. The purpose was not so much about promoting their new and unique painting style, but to free themselves from the constraints.
How did he paint:
In Monet's paintings, he documented the French countryside, which led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. He bought a house in Giverny in 1883 and began a vast landscaping project that would become the subjects of his best-known works.
In 1899 he painted the famous picture of water lilies in a vertical view with a Japanese bridge as a central feature.
After his wife died in 1876, he had difficult months. But after this tragedy, Monet began to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. Several landscapes and seascapes were painted, from the French countryside. These paintings became a series of pictures in which documented the same scene many times. The reason was to capture the changing of light and the different seasons.
Alice Hoschedè helped Monet to raise his two sons, with her own six children. Alice moved with all the kids after a while to Monet's house in Giverny. In 1892, Monet and Alice got married.
Monet´s impressive garden:
Monet bought a house with a big garden. He sold many paintings, and his economy went very well. They hired many workers and evolved the garden to a big park.
"a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art".
After evolving the garden, almost all of Monet´s painting is from this place, and the painting looks stunning.
The last years of his life:
Monet got lung cancer, and he died 5. December 1926, 86 years old. He has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism". Monet did a lot of research and was exploring new and improved methods of painterly expression. He began to think in terms of colours and shapes rather than scenes and objects. Of paint, he used bright colours in dabs, squiggles, and dashes.
"I like to paint as a bird sings."
All his life as a painter he repeatedly painted the same subject, for example, "Water Lilies", in different lights, in different hours of the day, and through the changes of weather and season.
Impression, Sunrise
Impression, Sunrise, first shown at what would become known as the "Exhibition of the Impressionists" in Paris in April, 1874. The painting is credited with inspiring the name of the Impressionist movement. Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le Havre, Monet's hometown.
The Japanese Footbridge
Immerses us in the physical experience of being in Monet´s garden. With the bands of the blue bridge suspended like a canopy near the top of the canvas and no sky to be seen, the water and billowing foliage fill the visual field, immersing the viewer in the verdant, brightly colored waterscape. Cool blue and green tones predominate but are balanced by the pink, white, and yellow lilies floating in complex pattern across the surface of the water from near to far. Controlled, vertical dabs of paint define the sparkling greenery and its fleeting reflection in the water, while the more fluid lilies are rendered with broad, textured, horizontal strokes that emphasize the shared physicality of the paint and the landscape.
Poppy Field in Argenteuil
Painted in 1873 on his return from the United Kingdom (in 1871) when he settled in Argenteuil with his family until 1878. This beautiful summer day is captured in all its glory with the vibrant poppies complementing the wispy clouds in a clear blue sky. In the landscape, a mother and child pair in the foreground and another in the background are merely a pretext for drawing the diagonal line that structures the painting.