Claude Monet 1840 – 1926

Biography

Claude Monet was a French painter and the founder of Impressionism. Born in Paris in 1840 and raised in Le Havre, he began as a caricaturist before turning to landscape painting outdoors, capturing fleeting light and atmosphere rather than precise detail. His painting Impression, Sunrise, exhibited in 1874, gave the movement its name. Over a long career he painted series of the same subject in different light: haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and the Houses of Parliament. In 1883 he settled at Giverny, where he created his famous water garden and spent his final decades painting its water lilies in enormous canvases. Despite failing eyesight from cataracts, he worked almost to the end of his life. He died at Giverny in 1926. His late water lily murals, housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, are among the most celebrated achievements of twentieth-century painting.