Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)

Overview

“Draw with all your might; you can never learn too much. However, don’t neglect painting: go to the country from time to time and make studies and above all develop them... show me what you’re doing and with enough courage you’ll make it.[1]”

—  Advice from Constant Troyon to Claude Monet, Paris, 1859

Claude Monet, the man who would later redefine the art world, began life far from the salons of Paris. Born Oscar-Claude Monet on November 14, 1840, in the capital, his real story started five years later when his family moved to Le Havre, a coastal town in Normandy. It was there—amid salt air, foggy mornings, and shifting tides—that Monet’s fascination with light and nature quietly took root.

Monet came from a relatively stable middle-class family. His father, Claude-Adolphe, ran a grocery and ship supply business, while his mother, Louise-Justine Aubrée, had musical inclinations. She supported her son’s early artistic interests, though her early death in 1857, when Monet was just 16, left a lasting emotional mark. By then, his gift for drawing was already obvious. At school, he was distracted and often disinterested, but his notebooks brimmed with caricatures. Locals took notice. He began selling his sketches at a local framing shop, a modest but telling sign of the artist’s entrepreneurial spirit.

That frame shop also introduced him to a man who would change his life: Eugène Boudin (1824-1898). An accomplished painter of seascapes, Boudin saw potential in the young Monet and took him under his wing. Boudin’s greatest lesson was not just how to use oil paints, but where to use them—outdoors, under the sky. Painting en plein air was, at the time, unconventional. It required speed, intuition, and a sensitivity to changing light. For Monet, it was a revelation.

Yet, not everyone shared Monet’s vision. His father was deeply skeptical of art as a profession and wanted Claude to work in the family business. When Monet resisted, his father withdrew financial support. Fortunately, Monet’s aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, a self-taught artist herself, stepped in to support his artistic training. In 1859, at age 18, Monet moved to Paris to pursue painting seriously.

In Paris, the crucible of 19th-century art, Monet found himself amid a restless wave of creativity. At the modest Académie Suisse, he encountered Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). Monet also admired Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and other realists who abandoned epic stories to reveal the poetry hidden in ordinary life.

But just as he was finding his voice, Claude Monet was drafted into the army in 1861 and sent to Algeria. The blazing sun and vivid landscapes left a lasting mark on his sense of color, though military life suited him poorly. A bout of typhoid fever led to an early discharge—on the condition that he return to art school.

Back in France by 1862, Monet began studying under Charles Gleyre (1806-1874), a respected academic painter in Paris. There, he met three fellow students who would become lifelong friends and fellow pioneers of Impressionism: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), and Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870). These young painters, like Monet, sought to capture life as it shimmered in real time—not as it was staged in studios.

Monet’s early life was not a tale of immediate triumph, but of vibrant vision. He was not shaped by institutions, but by wind, weather, and a handful of mentors who taught him to see the world—not as it ought to be, but as it shimmered in the moment.