Claude Monet

Born in Paris in 1840, Monet, at the age of five, moved with his parents to the Norman port of Le Havre. While still in his teens, the budding artist came to the attention of the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who saw talent and promise in Monet’s youthful efforts and took him on sketching trips in Normandy. Monet’s practice of painting outdoors would determine what he would paint, and how he would paint, for the rest of his life. In 1859 Monet moved to Paris to study painting. Over the next few years, he became friends with other young artists who would join him in the forefront of the impressionist movement. Monet spent most of the 1870s painting near Paris, but in the following decade, he repeatedly returned to the Normandy coast. It was during this series of extended painting campaigns that he first experimented with simultaneously working on several canvases depicting a single site at different times of day and under different weather conditions. These paintings foreshadow the masterful series that would follow in the 1890s: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, Grainstacks, and Mornings on the Seine. At age forty-two Monet made Normandy his permanent home, settling in the small Norman village of Giverny, where he painted the fields, valleys, and waterways near his home. Late in life the gardens and water-lily pond on the grounds of his home became his primary artistic focus until his death at age 86.