Claude Oscar Monet was a founder and central figure of the 19th century art movement known as Impressionism. Monet was born on November 14.1840.in Paris.France, to Claude-Adolphe, a grocery store owner, and Louise-Justine Aubree, a singer.

He was raised in Le Havre, where he developed a reputation as a caricature artist by the time he was 15.

In 1858.the young artist met landscape painter Eugиne Boudin, a mentor who first introduced him to outdoor painting.

There, he was inspired by the work of Eugиne Delacroix.Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot.

He studied at the free Acadйmie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro.

Claude Monet took a brief hiatus from his artistic pursuits to serve in the military in Algeria from 1860 to 1862. Upon his return to Paris, he picked up where he left off, studying art, experimenting with new styles, traveling, and forming important friendships with fellow painters, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir.Alfred Sisley.Frйdйric Bazille, and Йdouard Manet. He also worked in the forest at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon artists Thйodore Rousseau.Jean Franзois Millet, as well as with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. During the 1860s.Claude Monet was constantly traveling, having become captivated by natural light, atmosphere, and color.

The artist continually sought to convey the remarkable variety and subtle particulars of each new landscape.

The artist was financially unstable and frequently destroyed his own paintings rather than have them seized by creditors. In 1870.Claude Monet married his wife.Camille, and the two traveled to London and eventually settled at Argenteuil.

His best-known, most popular works were produced during this time at Argenteuil, where he often painted alongside Renoir.Sisley.Caillebotte, and Manet.

Monet regularly exhibited his paintings in the private Impressionist group shows, which first took place in 1874. The paintings are essentially illusionist, but ring with a chromatic vibrancy.

Monet worked directly from nature and revealed that even on the darkest, gloomiest day, an infinite variety of colors exist.

To capture the fleeting lights and hues.Monet had to employ a new painting technique using short brushstrokes filled with individual color.

The result was a canvas alive with painterly activity, the opposite of the smooth blended surfaces of the past.

While traditional landscape artists painted what they saw in their mind.Claude Monet, sought to paint the world exactly how he saw it, not how he knew it should look. So rather than painting a myriad of separate leaves, he depicted splashes of constantly changing light and color. In depicting the natural world, he based his art on perceptual rather than conceptual knowledge. In 1883 Claude Monet moved to Giverny, and likewise most of his Impressionist colleagues left the security of the cohesive group to explore their own directions. While his home was in Giverny, he never ceased traveling-to London.Madrid, and Venice, as well as within his native country.

It was then that he began his famous series of water lily paintings at Giverny.

The works themselves were revolutionary.12 large canvases that required the artist to learn an entirely new style of painting characterized by broad, sweeping strokes. Claude Monet even went back and adjusted some of these colors after his surgery. Claude Oscar Monet died in 1926 from lung cancer. He is buried in the cemetery of the Giverny church. His remaining family and heirs bequeathed his Giverny home and gardens to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me.I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

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