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Oscar-Claude Monet , French impressionist painter.

Claude Monet was born in Paris, the great capital city of the wonderful country that is France. When he was only six the whole Monet famille moved to Le Havre, located on the coast of Normandy. Like many a father, Claude Monet's wanted him to enter the family business - the Monet's were famed locally as grocers before Claude made the family name synonomous with fine art and calenders.

Claude Monet had other ideas and started to paint. he slipped away to study painting on his own, and persuaded the artist Eugène Boudin to teach him some painting techniques. It was Boudin who instilled the method of working outside, quickly, on plein air paintings in the young Monet, as they worked together on quick sketches of the Normandy beaches.

At first Claude Monet could not get out of the French requirement for military service, which he had to serve in Algeria, as was normal at that time. Eventually his aunt Lecadre agreed to get him out of the army if he took an art course at a university. He left the army, but he did not like the traditional painting styles the university taught.

In 1862 Monet studied art with Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir with whom he founded the Impressionist movement. They painted together and maintained a lifelong friendship.

Monet could also use the studio and paint its models for a low cost. He painted Camille Doncieux, and later they were married. He painted Women in the Garden in the late 1860s. They moved to a house in Argenteuil, near the Seine River, after he and his wife had their first child. They lived there for six years until Camille died; he painted her on her death-bed. Monet then moved to a house in Giverny, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie Region where he planted a large garden.

In 1872 Monet painted Impression: Sunrise (Impression: Soleil Levant - now in the Musée Marmottan, Paris), a landscape of Le Havre, which was hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. It is said that a hostile critic, from the title of this picture, used the name "Impressionists" by commenting that their paints were indeed "impressions" rather than finished works of art. By the third exhibition in 1876 the painters we know as the Impressionists were using the term about themselves.

He married Alice Hoschede in 1892, whom he had an affair with while he was married to Camille.

In the 1880s and 1890s Monet painted a series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral from different points of view and at different times of the day. Twenty views of the cathedral were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1895. He also made series-paintings of haystacks.

Monet was exceptionally fond of painting controlled nature - his own garden, his water lilies, his pond, and his bridge. His garden had a meadow with willows and a marsh. He also painted up and down the banks of the Seine. In 1914 Monet began a major new large series of the water lily scenes at the suggestion of his friend, the politician Georges Clemenceau.

He is interred in the Giverny Church Cemetery, Giverny, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie, Region of France.

Recent sales of a Monet painting exceeded US$22 million.

other views of Claude Monet

1. The housewife's favourite

What is it about Monet that everybody likes? Here we have some shimmering images, pretty yes, but they have been taken to another level, up there with van gogh and a few others, but they are still nineteenth century mind-sap TV. Where are the ideas that make you want to look and keep looking?

His series of haystacks, cathedrals when seen together do exert a strange contemplation of life's darkness and the end that is coming to us all. The way he uses his colours, placed unmixed on the canvas, with the canvas poking though and at last being part of the work. here is a glimpse of greatness.

Monet is justly famous for having started the plein aire attitude to art which has continued to this day. nothing is real unless painted from life, models in studios are not on, he seemed to say.

Seeing paintings that he and Renoir painted side by side seating by the edge of a field or a canal is to taste the excitement of these men making their tentativem then more firm, then downright certain steps through the Parisien art world.

Monet. Everyone loves him, and he deserves it. Just.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Monet".