Claude Monet
On November 14, 1840, Claude Monet was born. On December 5, 1926, he passed away. In his lifetime, Monet accomplished many monumental things. Monet was born in Paris but his family soon relocated to Normandy, where he later met landscape artist Eugene Boudin, who introduced him to a style of art called plein air. Plein air painting is a style of painting where the artist goes out into the world and paints the landscape, instead of sitting in a studio. As a child, Monet’s passion for art was evident in his caricatures (which are drawings of an exaggerated feature of someone to produce a comical effect) of his teachers and other townspeople. When he met Bodin, his style of work began to solely focus on this type of art. In 1859, Monet moved to Paris to continue his work in art where he met Johann Barthold Jongkind who further influenced his interest in landscape art.
Claude Monet is known as the Father of Impressionism, a style of capturing light and natural forms. He is known as this because of his piece Impression, Sunrise seemed as if it was an unfinished piece, and critics then used the word impressionist to categorize artists with similar styles of art. It had intentions as being an insult, but impressionists did not see it that way, instead, they embraced the name and began the Impressionism movement in art. Monet’s art captured the essence and emotion of his landscape through the use of bright oil paints and short brush strokes, creating an unevenness to his work.
Most of Monet’s works are oil paintings. Monet is known to use a canvas of light color, from white to light yellow. He also chose to limit his paints to nine colors in order to focus more on light quality and evoke a feeling of his work from his colors. Colors to Monet were vessels of attachment and held special meaning to them.
Monet’s work stands out because of his style of painting. He didn’t blend his colors; rather, he used short and light brush strokes to layer his paint. This created a flat image. There are no sketch lines, just laying the paint to produce the forms of different subjects, like trees and buildings. His work has a blurred effect as if we are moving past the image.