Art Brokerage: (1840-1926) Born November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. Claude Monet 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 Eugène Boudin, a mentor who first introduced him to outdoor painting. Monet was reluctant to leave the studio and the familiarity of indoor scenes, but plein air painting eventually became the basis for his life's work. Against his parents's wishes, Claude Monet left home for Paris in 1859 to pursue a career in painting. There, he was inspired by the work of Eugene Delacroix, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. Claude Monet studied at the free Acadamie Suisse, where he met Camille Pissarro, and was a frequent patron of the Brasserie des Martyrs, a gathering place for fellow realist artists such as Gustave Courbet. 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, Fredric Bazille, and Edouard Manet. He also worked in the forest at Fontainebleau with the Barbizon artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean François 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. Monet continually sought to convey the remarkable variety and subtle particulars of each new landscape. Tragically, few of Monet's canvases from this early period survived. 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. During that first show his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a hostile newspaper critic to call all the artists "Impressionists," a name that persists to characterize the artistic movement today. Claude Monet's paintings from the 1870s are fine examples of the new Impressionist style. 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. Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony. Giverny, his famous home, garden and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966. Through the Fondation Claude Monet, the house and gardens were opened for visit in 1980, following restoration. In addition to souvenirs of Monet and other objects of his life, the house contains his collection of Japanese woodcut prints.
Art Brokerage has a buyer for a major Monet original painting. No price limit.
