Claude Monet Research Paper

Claude Monet was born on November 14th, 1840 in Paris. However, five years later his family moved to Le Havre, which is where Monet spent his childhood. Le Havre did not provide a supportive setting for an artistic career; the region lacked an art school, exhibitions, and significant museum collections. Monet’s father was a grocer and expected him to enter the business as well.1 Despite the lack of encouragement from his father, Monet starting drawing caricatures of French politicians copied from newspapers and portraits of his neighbors. He exhibited these drawings in a frame shop next to his father’s grocery store, where they were noticed by an artist named Eugene Boudin. Boudin recognized Monet’s talent and introduced him to painting en plein air in 1857.2 From there on, Monet was captivated by the beauty nature, and while he continued to paint figures, Monet transitioned to primarily painting landscapes.3
In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was held at 35 boulevard des Capucines, Paris. The purpose of the exhibition was to offer artists a chance to break from the current conventions of neoclassicism and to showcase their work without being curated by a jury.4 Monet exhibited several paintings, one of which was Impression, Sunrise. The painting’s title prompted critics to start using the term “Impressionist” to label the style of capturing a subject’s impression instead of its details and optical color mixing that Monet and his contemporaries used. Though at first taken as an insult, the term came to define the movement started by Monet.4
In April of 1883, Monet moved to the small town of Giverny, France. Monet was an avid horticulturist and with the help of an engineer and a group of workers, he transformed a nearb...

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...out his message. In a letter to Durand-Ruel he wrote. “These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. … I hope that something will come out of so much effort…”12
Even though this series was repetitive, Monet was still bringing forth something new. In post-Dreyfus France, Monet was referencing Japanese aesthetics to communicate his point. Like Japanese woodblock prints, Monet’s water lily paintings used raw color, incorporated a curved footbridge, and were composed without linear perspective.13 By doing this, Monet was engaging sentiments of Eastern art. He wanted the citizens of France to observe the simplicity of the organic environment and for artists to revalue nature as a method to heal as well as to decorate.14 By associating his works with the East