Claude Monet
1840 : birth in Paris, November the 14th
1845 : installation of the family close to Le Havre. He begins to paint with the landscape painter Eugène Boudin in the countryside of Normandy.
1859 - 1861 : Monet installs himself in Paris where he studies the paint in the academy of Charles Suisse, more liberal than the Fine Arts one.
1861 - 1862 : military service in Algeria
1862 - 1865 : he takes courses in Charles Gleyre's school of painting; he makes Renoir's acquaintance there, with Sisley and Bazille too.
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1869 - 1870
: he paints with Renoir a series of pictures of a "guinguette"
on the edges of river Seine in Bougival : "la
Grenouillère". He marries Camille in 1870, mother
of his sons Jean who was born in 1867. 1870 - 1871 : refugied in London during the french-german war, he Discovers there the work of William Turner. Then, he returns in France and installs himself in Argenteuil 1874 : first exhibition of the independent artists, in the workshop of the photographer Nadar. The despising cristicism will baptize them with the term of impressionists, in reference to one of his canvases : "impression - sunrise". 1877 - 1882: Monet participates in several expositions. He paints a series of pictures of The Saint Lazare railway station. Death of Camille in 1879 1883 : installation in Giverny; along the years, he will lay out there his water garden. 1884 - 1891 : numerous trips In France and abroad. Series of the "haystacks" and of the "poplars" |
1892 : marriage with Alice. Series of the "cathedrals"
1897 : Monet begins planning the project of the waterlilies cycle. He will spend the 30 last years of his life, painting exclusively in his garden, by the pond, surrounded by greenery.
1890 - 1900 : paintings of the japanese bridge.
1900 - 1920: Monet paints waterlilies and other aquatic plants with a concern for detail and color more and more pushed. His wife , Alice dies in 1911, his son Jean in 1914. To the instigation of his friend Clémenceau, he will make a gift to France with the watelilies cycle, on the day after the armistice of November 11th 1918.
1920 - 1926 : Monet works to his big decorations. It is a body of panels of 2 meters high that, altogether will represent a 90 meters long. The subject always is the aquatic landscape. These panels will be set up in the Orangery museum, in Paris, about 1 year after the death of the painter, happened on December 5th 1926
Monet is the painter of landscapes and nature, ecologist before the term was invented. The human element is very little present in his work, no portrait, the removed personages are there only to melt themselves in the landscape; they will finally desappear totally from 1890.
 Youth before the war |
Serial painter |
| On the edges of Seine |
The painter in his garden |
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