Claude Monet French, 1840-1926

Claude Monet stands at the centre of one of the most significant shifts in nineteenth-century painting. Born in Paris, he spent much of his childhood in Le Havre, where the coastline, harbour traffic and changing weather formed an early visual education. Initially recognised locally for caricatures, his direction altered decisively through the guidance of Eugène Boudin. This early discipline of close looking would underpin Monet’s practice for the rest of his life. In the early 1860s Monet returned to Paris, studying briefly at the Académie Suisse before joining Charles Gleyre’s studio. There he formed lasting friendships with artists including Renoir, Sisley and Bazille, united by a shared dissatisfaction with academic convention. Financial insecurity and repeated rejections from the Salon marked these years, yet Monet continued to pursue painting from nature, favouring everyday scenes, riversides and suburban landscapes over historical subject matter. His emphasis on atmosphere, colour relationships and perceptual immediacy contributed directly to the emergence of Impressionism, a term first applied disparagingly after the 1874 independent exhibition that included Impression, soleil levant.

From the late 1870s Monet increasingly focused on working in series, returning repeatedly to the same motif to record changing conditions of season, time and weather. After periods spent in Normandy, on the Seine, and in London, he settled permanently at Giverny in 1883. There he designed and cultivated an extensive garden, including the water garden that would dominate his later work. In his final decades Monet devoted himself almost exclusively to the large-scale water-lily paintings, produced despite declining eyesight. These works, concerned with surface, reflection and spatial ambiguity, exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century painting and secured Monet’s position as a foundational figure of modern art.