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His first impression
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The Impressionist movement took its name from one of Claude Monet's paintings
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Born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, Claude Monet was the driving force of the Impressionist Movement. It is only right that the movement took its name from a Monet painting, Impression Sunrise. The name came up purely by chance. A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue and Monet suggested Impression. Renoir's brother, who was the catalogue editor, added Sunrise, and thus, a movement was named.
Monet spent his youth in Le Havre and excelled in caricature. Following his mentor Eugene Baudin's suggestion to paint outdoors, Monet took to landscape painting. He studied at the Aletier Suisse from 1859 where he met Pissaro.
He returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind to whom he said he owed "the definitive education of my eye". In 1862 he met Renoir, Sisley and Bazille at the studio of Gleyre and the core group of the Impressionists was formed.
He left for England during the Franco Prussian War (1870) where he studied the paintings of Constable and Turner. Monet stayed in Argenteuil between 1871 and 1878 and that was where the most exuberant Impressionist works were produced not only by Monet but also Manet, Renoir and Sisley.
Light was an important feature of Monet's paintings. He painted the same subject at different times of the day like his famous Rouen Cathedral series. Towards his later years failing eyesight troubled him. He famously flung away a pair of glasses saying: "If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!" He, however, was prolific till the end, which came on December 5, 1926, when he succumbed to lung cancer.
Mini Anthikad-Chhibber
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