The shimmering light and breathtaking colors of Claude Monet‘s work have made him one of the world’s most popular artists for almost a century. His studies of the changing effects of sunlight on haystacks, churches, fields, and water gardens were unique in his time and extremely influential to subsequent generations. As a founder of the style known as impressionism, Monet broke with many traditions to create a new method of painting–and of seeing the world around us. Without his innovations, the course of twentieth-century art would have been quite different.
Claude-Oscar Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840. When he was five years old, his family moved to Le Havre, a port on the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Paris. Monet’s father owned a grocery store from which he supplied sailors and shipping companies. Young
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Monet loved painting in the open air and did so for the rest of his life. He was able to do so early in his career because paint had begun to become available in tubes that artists could carry with them. Before, they were forced to mix colored powder and oil in jars, a very messy process that was particularly clumsy outside the studio.
Monet’s family was not keen on his chosen profession; they wanted him to join the family grocery business. But when he was nineteen, one of his aunts who loved to paint gave him the money to go to Paris to study art. Still, Monet was not satisfied with the traditional styles that were being taught there. He longed to get outdoors and paint the sunlight and trees and water. In Paris Monet met other young painters who shared his desires, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ?douard Manet, Alfred Sisley, and Fr?d?ric Bazille among them. Monet’s family continued to scorn his career choice and the artist was frequently forced to borrow money from