Let's Celebrate Claude Monet's Birthday, November 14, 1840!

Hi-

In case you missed it, Claude Monet’s 170th birthday was yesterday, November 14. I think this occasion deserves a lot more than my little blog post, but I haven’t seen or heard anyone online, or anywhere actually, talk about the anniversary of Monet’s birth. Now maybe they celebrated it with birthday parties at Musee d’Orsay or Giverny and I’m just not aware of it.

 Anyway, I decided to list just a few brief facts about his life in homage to the great painter:

• Oscar Claude Monet was Born November 14, 1840, in Paris to Claude and Louise. 
• The family moved to Le Havre in 1845, a seacoast town on the English Channel, where Monet studies at the art school and later becomes known as a caricaturist, well enough to earn a living even as a teenager. 
• Monet studies oil painting under the tutelage of Eugene Boudin in 1857. 
• By 1862 Monet lives in Paris and is a student in Charles Gleyre’s art school along with fellow painters Pierre-August Renoir, Frederic Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. It was here these painters experimented with plein air painting and loose, open brushwork. 
• Monet paints Impression: Sunrise, a painting of the port at Le Havre, in 1872. 
• Several of the “new” painters hold their first exhibition in 1874, including Impression: Sunrise, which provides the name for Impressionism and the modern era of painting.
• In the 1870s Monet paints what were to become some of his most famous paintings including The Bridge at Argenteuil, Poppies Blooming, Saint Lazare Train Station, and Woman With a Parasol, just to name a few. 
• In 1883 Monet, his second wife, and family move to Giverny.
• In the 1880s and 1890s Monet experiments with painting the changing daylight in several series of paintings including Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral.
• In later life in the first two decades of the 20th century Monet devotes his energy to his gardens at Giverny and painting perhaps his most famous paintings of water lilies, ponds, and his well-known bridge. 
• Claude Monet dies December 5, 1926.

 I believe Monet’s impact on the world of art and painting is immeasurable. Just think about it, without Monet and Impressionism what would today’s art world look like?

 

Until next blog…