Claude MonetBorn: November 14,1840 Paris, France Died: December 5, 1926. Monet was

a founder of French impressionist painting

Life Circumstances

.His parents, Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet was a grocer and singer. In 1845 the family moved to Le Havre, France, where Monet's father and uncle ran a business selling supplies for ships.

.At fifteen Claude Monet was a popular caricaturist (one who makes exaggerated portraits of people).

Life circumstances• Eugène Boudin, a landscape painter who became a great influence on the

young artist; introduced Monet to outdoor painting, an activity that soon became his life's work. He thought him how to use oil paints and techniques.

• He worked at the free Académie Suisse in Paris, and he frequented the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for Gustave Courbet but his worked was interrupted by military affairs in Algeria for two years.

• Monet was signed for a seven year commitment but caught typhoid fever and his aunt helped him get out and the army agreed but Monet had to complete an art course and art school.

Interesting Facts

• This wonderful artist was baptized in Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the local parish church.

• Monet was baptized as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. Strange that we all call him Claude.

• At the young age of thirty-two, Monet’s wife, Camille Monet, died of tuberculosis. Even while on her deathbed, Monet took the opportunity to paint his wife.

Interesting Facts

• In 1892, Claude Monet married Alice Hoschedé

• Alice helped him raise his two kids along with her six children she brought them to Paris with her kids.

• His home, garden and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966.

• On June 24, 2008, Le bassin aux nymphéas sold at Christie’s for $71,892,376.34. With Fees it ending up being auctioned for $80,451,178 .

• Monet was seen as a rebel at school. He would draw caricatures of his teachers and friends instead of doing his work.

• Camille Doncieux was the model for the figures in Women in the Garden and On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt which were painted in 1868.

Medium and Style

• "I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I'd be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was 'somebody'. In the shop-window of the one and only frame maker who could eke out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and

crying 'Why, that's so-and-so!', I was just bursting with pride."