The Frenchman Claude Monet co-founded the Impressionist movement which changed the face of art.
The Frenchman Claude Monet co-founded the Impressionist movement which changed the face of art.
More than 100 years on, he is still among the world’s favourite painters.
In 1999 a record-breaking three-quarters of a million fans flocked to a three-month Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.
Monet, born in Paris in 1840, grew up in Le Havre and began to study drawing in his teens.
Gallery of Monet's most famous works
He was encouraged by the French painter Eugene Boudin to paint outdoors and by the age of 19 he was painting full-time in Paris.
There Monet got to know other young artists including Pierre Renoir and Camille Pissarro.
His early landscapes were conventional enough and well-received at official exhibitions.
But as his style developed it became much less traditional.
He and his colleagues began breaking rule after rule — causing fury among the Establishment.
Monet maintained his practice of painting outside, instead of in a studio.
He also chose to depict the world around him rather than historical scenes or figures, as was the tradition.
His technique was to convey a realistic “impression” of a scene at that moment, by omitting detail and using broad, broken strokes of bright colours to achieve a spontaneous look.
The turning point for Monet came in 1874 when he, Renoir and Pissarro — rejected by the Establishment — staged their own exhibition in Paris.
Among the paintings on display there was Monet’s classic 1873 work The Poppy Field as well as his Impression: Sunrise.
Critics seized upon the title of the latter and sneeringly called the movement, which they considered slapdash and second-rate, “Impressionism”. It stuck.
Traditionalists may not have liked Monet, but the public did.
By the mid-1880s he was famous and relatively rich. He bought a house in 1890 at Giverny, near Paris, and built a water garden.
From 1906 until his death in 1926 he painted scenes from the garden. They include the famous Waterlilies — huge canvases, several of which are on display at the Orangerie in Paris.
Modern-day Monet fans flock to his garden, now open to the public.
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