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Claude Monet
Paris, 1840-Giverny, 1926
Claude Monet was without doubt the leader of the Impressionist painters. He spent his childhood in Le Havre where he began to paint landscapes of the Normandy coast together with Eugène Boudin and Johan Jongkind. After a short period studying at the Académie Suisse in Paris, he dedicated himself to painting out of doors in a self-taught manner, aiming to study the effects of light and time on nature.
It was Monet and Auguste Renoir who first used the loose brushstroke which was to become characteristic of Impressionism. Monet's painting, Impression, Sun rising, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and would give rise to the name of the movement. From 1872 to 1878 the artist lived with his family in Argenteuil. During that time this village on the banks of the Seine became a sort of centre for Impressionism, where Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir and Manet worked alongside Monet, together with other artists. From 1878 to 1881 Monet lived in Vétheuil with Camille his wife and their son Jean, and it was here that Camille died. In Vétheuil, which was much quieter and more rural than Argenteuil, Monet produced a large number of works, and, in contrast to the preceding period, focused on the beauty of nature and on depicting solitary landscapes with no signs of human life in them. In Vétheuil he began to paint his series in which he repeated similar subjects under changing atmospheric conditions.
In 1883, he retired to Giverny to the north-east of Paris, together with Alice Hoschedé (the widow of the Impressionist collector Ernest Hoschedé) and their children. They would spend the remainder of their lives there. In Giverny Monet painted the Waterlilies series, in which he systematically repeated the subject of the waterlily pond in his garden. During those years his brushstrokes became ever looser and took on the form of free, wavy lines, which have been seen as a forerunner of abstract painting.
Dixton, A., McNamara, C. and Suckey, Ch.: Monet at Vétheuil. The Turning Point. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1998.
Geoffroy, G.: Claude Monet, sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre. Paris, 1922.
Huyghe, R.: La Peinture française au XIXème siècle. Paris, 1974.
Wildenstein, D.: Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné. 5 vols., Lausanne, 1974-1979.
Wildenstein, D.: Claude Monet: catalogue raisonné: Werkverzeichnis. Cologne, 1996.
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