Claude Monet
Born: 1840
Died: 1926
Claude Monet was born in Paris but educated at Le Havre, on the Northern French coast, where he was encouraged to turn away from portraiture to paint directly from nature. In the 1860s he met Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir and Manet in Paris. These friendships combined to create a new direction in art for the first impressionist exhibition of 1874. The aim of this movement was to produce paintings entirely faithful to reality; to make an exact analysis of tone and colour as well as capture the reflections on the surfaces of objects. Monet was dedicated to the study of light and its changing effect in nature. He settled at Giverny, northern-eastern France in 1883, where he created a beautiful garden filled with elaborate arrangements of plants and flowers. Here, in the 1890s, he began to paint subjects in series recording the varying light conditions at different times of the day. In his painting, Blue water lilies, from the atmosphere that envelopes them suffused light, the painting surrounds and submerges the spectator and is all the more astonishing with the knowledge that Monet's eyesight was failing. He was to die, nearly blind.
text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.