(1840-1926)

Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. On the first
of April, 1851 Monet entered the Le Havre in secondary school  of the arts. He has first drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois
Ochard, a former student ofJacques-Louis David . On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist
Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor)
techniques for painting.

When Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre in 1859. Monet was in Paris for several years and met several painters who would become friends and fellow impressionists. One of those friends was Édouard Manet. Monet most like met Pissaro, enrolled in the 'Acadamie Suisse. Paris, and here were painted some of his best known works. In 1873 or 1874, he briefly returned to Amsterdam. In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris.

Impression, Sunrise
Oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm

This painting is a striking example of the new style. Critic Louis Leroy, inspired by the painting's name, titled his hostile review of the show in Le Charivari newspaper, "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", thus inadvertently naming the new art movement. Monet painted the sun as having almost exactly the same luminance as that of the sky, a condition which suggests high humidity and atmospheric attenuation of light. This detail relies on the use of complementary colors and variety of color temperature, rather than changes in color intensity or contrast of values, to differentiate the sun from the surrounding sky.

In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo. Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny.