Claude Monet

Claude Monet gave Impressionism its name and spent sixty years painting light rather than things. Born in Paris in 1840 and raised in Le Havre, he made money as a teenager drawing caricatures, and was taught to work outdoors by Eugène Boudin, which he later called the decisive event of his life. He studied in Paris, met Renoir, Sisley and Bazille, and served in Algeria before being invalided out. Impression, Sunrise, painted at Le Havre and shown at the independent exhibition of 1874, gave a hostile critic the term he used to mock the whole group. They adopted it. The method was to paint the motif in front of it, quickly, in broken touches of unmixed colour that resolve at a distance, and to treat shadow as coloured rather than dark. The subject was the moment — weather, hour, season — rather than the object. He was very poor into his forties. His first wife Camille died in 1879 at thirty-two, and he painted her on her deathbed, later writing with horror that he had found himself automatically analysing the colours of her face. From the 1890s he worked in series — grainstacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament — painting the same subject repeatedly at different times of day, working on many canvases at once and changing them as the light moved. He bought the property at Giverny in 1890, built the water garden, and spent his last thirty years painting the lily pond, ending with the enormous Grandes Décorations panels he gave to France. He had cataract surgery in 1923 and died in 1926.

• Lived: 1840 CE – 1926 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter