Monet, Claude

French painter. He was a pioneer of Impressionism and a lifelong exponent of its ideals; his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) gave the movement its name. In the 1870s he began painting the same subjects at different times of day to explore the ever-changing effects of light on colour and form; the Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral series followed in the 1890s, and from 1899 he painted a series of Water Lilies in the garden of his house at Giverny, Normandy (now a museum).

He spent his youth at Le Havre, where he was diverted from caricature to open-air landscape painting by the encouragement of Boudin. Boudin and Jongkind, with whom Monet became friendly in 1860, had taught him much about atmosphere before he went in 1862 to Gleyre's studio in Paris, where he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. He painted with them in the forest of Fontainebleau and until 1870 was engaged in perfecting a new approach to which the realism of Courbet and the direct method of Manet both contributed, as may be seen in the beautiful Femmes au Jardin (1867; Louvre), and the Manetesque Plage à Trouville. (1870; Tate). A wartime interlude followed, spent in Holland and London, where he admired the works of Turner. He worked at Argenteuil 1872–78, where he had a floating studio, his mature method of rendering light in colour being now fully developed. His Impression in the exhibition of 1874, in which he and his friends appeared as a fairly homogeneous group, brought the term Impressionism into currency for the first time. He painted at Vétheuil 1878–83, and afterwards settled at Giverny, where in the garden of his house he painted his last remarkable studies of water lilies. Almost abstract visions of colour, these studies were long regarded dubiously as the most formless of his works, but have been hailed in recent years as outstanding examples of pure painting.