1. Claude Monet
Claude Monet is our artist for today. He was a great artist that helped invent the style of art we call impressionism. This is a photo of Monet from 1899.

2. Monet’s street!
Monet was born in Paris France on the fifth floor of a building on this very street! Of course, it looked very different in 1840 from the way it looks here. He was the second son born to his mom Louise and his dad Claude. Monet’ real first name is actually Oscar (Oscar Claude Monet), but he was called Claude like his dad.

3. When Monet was little, his family moved to Le Havre, which was a town right on the sea. This is an old postcard that shows what the town looked like then. Monet’s family owned a grocery store there, and they wanted Monet to work there when he grew up. Luckily for us, Monet didn’t want to do that. Instead, he wanted to be an artist.

4. A friend of Monet’s family reported that when he was little, Monet would ask his family to do sketching contests with him. He’d hand out pages of a sketchbook and challenge everyone to draw the same thing. Needless to say, Monet usually won! Sometimes family friends would even buy the sketches from him! Here is a rough sketch he did of a train station. He would later use sketches like these to create full color paintings.

5. In school, Monet was never a great student
In school, Monet was never a great student. He didn’t listen very well and got in trouble a lot. He spent a lot of his time drawing funny pictures called caricatures. This is one he did when he was 15 years old - it is now on display at the Art Institute in Chicago. People began to pay him to do these funny pictures.

6. When Claude was 18, he finally decided to go to art school in Paris even though his dad was against it. He didn’t like art school much either. They taught an old fashioned way of painting that used dark colors and showed important events like battles, or pictures of famous people. They also tried to teach Claude to paint inside, in a studio. But Claude wanted to paint outside, “en plien air,” which means “from nature.” This is an early painting he did when he was 25. It shows some of the darker colors he was being taught to use, but also shows how much Monet loved to paint nature and especially water. Painting outside meant that sometimes sand or other things blowing around in the wind would get stuck in the paint. The square at the bottom shows a close-up of one of Monet’s paintings, with bits of shell and sand that have dried into the oil paint.

7. Claude met other artists in school who were just as interested in nature, water, and the way light changes the way you see things. One of them was the artist Renoir, who you’ve probably heard of. He and his friends had no money, and all they cared about was painting. He and Renoir once ate nothing but beans for two months straight!

8. In order to get to be well known as an artist back then, you had to have a painting shown in a big art show called the Salon. The Salon tended to show paintings that were made in the way Monet’s art school had tried to teach him. Dark colors, very staged scenes that didn’t usually look very natural, and very precise brush strokes. This is a painting the salon chose, done by one of Monet’s teachers. This is not the style Monet wanted to paint.

9. This was the painting Monet prepared for the Salon
This was the painting Monet prepared for the Salon. It was called Women in the Garden, and it was painted outside. Monet waited for the light to be just right so the painting looked how he imagined he wanted it to be. The painting was huge - about 8 feet tall, and Monet had to dig a trench in the ground and use a pulley system to lower it so that he could paint the top half! Still, the salon rejected this painting because it wasn’t what they were used to.

10. Still, Monet went on painting the way he wanted to paint
Still, Monet went on painting the way he wanted to paint. He moved into a house with his wife and son and they lived right next to his friend Renoir. His paintings took on a very definite style that we now call impressionism. This painting, called “Impression, Sunrise” is where the name impressionism comes from. You can see the big brush strokes and see how much attention he gave to the water and the way the sun reflects off of it. It tries to give the “impression” of the scene right at the moment it was painted. This painting was part of a show that Claude and his friends put on since none of them could get a piece of art accepted into the Salon. Most people thought the art in this show was not very good, since they were still used to the Salon style of painting.

11. Claude continued to struggle, with no money and no one liking his art, until about Suddenly, people were starting to like what he painted. This is a painting he did when he went to visit Renoir in Italy. Monet began to use a new palette of colors that were much brighter and closer to the colors we think of when we think of impressionism.

12. These are the colors that now made up Claude’s palette
These are the colors that now made up Claude’s palette. Notice there are no black or brown colors - Claude stopped using these altogether by the end of his career.

13. Finally, Monet was becoming famous
Finally, Monet was becoming famous. He bought a beautiful house in Giverny, France and filled the gardens with all of his favorite flowers. He hired cooks and gardeners to help him take care of the house, and had a waterlily pond built with a little bridge over it that he would later paint.

14. Here are two pictures of his lily pond…

15. When Monet was 68, he began losing his eyesight because of something called cataracts. He eventually had surgery to get some of his eyesight back, but it was never completely normal again. Despite this, he continued working on a huge project that he called his Decorations. They were giant panels over 6 1/2’ high and 14’ wide. He made over 22 of them, and all were giant paintings of waterlilies that were to decorate his studio. He died 3 years after completing this panel. He was 86 years old when he died and had completed over 2,000 paintings in his life.