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Early Life & Education
Born Oscar-Claude Monet on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, he was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet, a wholesale merchant, and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. The family moved to Le Havre in 1845, where the coastal environment became a formative influence on his artistic sensibility. By age fifteen, Monet was earning money through caricatures and portraits. In 1858, he met Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to plein air painting—working directly outdoors to capture natural light and atmospheric conditions. This mentorship proved decisive, steering Monet away from academic studio conventions and laying the foundation for his lifelong engagement with landscape and perception.

Key Life Events & Historical Context
Conscripted into the French army in 1861, Monet served in Algeria, where the intense North African light deepened his sensitivity to chromatic variation. After returning to Paris, he studied under Charles Gleyre, forming close alliances with future Impressionists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 forced Monet to flee to London, where he encountered the luminous works of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable at the National Gallery. These exposures reinforced his interest in light as a subject in itself. There, he also met Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become his principal dealer. In 1874, the exhibition of *Impression, Sunrise* (1872) sparked critical mockery but inadvertently named the Impressionist movement, which Monet would come to define through both practice and perseverance.

Influences
Eugène Boudin was Monet’s earliest and most formative influence, instilling in him the discipline of outdoor painting and a reverence for skies and seascapes. In Paris, the collaborative spirit among artists in Gleyre’s studio—particularly with Bazille and Renoir—fostered experimental techniques that challenged academic norms. During his exile in London, the atmospheric intensity of Turner’s late works and Constable’s naturalism further expanded Monet’s understanding of light as a dynamic, mutable force, shaping his evolving approach to color and brushwork.

Artistic Career
Monet emerged as a central figure in the Impressionist movement, exhibiting in seven of the eight independent Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. His early breakthrough came with *Impression, Sunrise*, but it was his serial investigations—beginning with the *Haystacks* (1890–1891) and continuing with *Rouen Cathedral* (1892–1894)—that established his reputation for probing the perceptual effects of light across time. In 1883, he settled in Giverny, where he designed an elaborate garden that became the primary subject of his later years. There, he began the *Water Lilies* cycle, a monumental project spanning over two decades and culminating in the Grandes Décorations donated to the French state.

Artistic Style & Themes
Monet’s style is defined by rapid, broken brushwork, a luminous palette, and an unwavering focus on optical experience. He rejected fixed forms in favor of transient visual impressions, often painting the same motif at different times of day or in varying weather to study shifts in light and color. His *Haystacks* and *Rouen Cathedral* series exemplify this method, dissolving solid architecture into shimmering fields of hue. In the *Water Lilies* paintings, the boundaries between water, sky, and reflection blur, creating immersive, almost abstract compositions that anticipate developments in modern art.

Exhibitions & Representation
Monet’s work gained international prominence through the advocacy of Paul Durand-Ruel, whose galleries in Paris, London, and New York introduced Impressionism to a global audience. Major retrospectives during his lifetime, including a landmark 1883 exhibition at Galerie Georges Petit, affirmed his stature. Today, his work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris houses the permanent installation of his *Water Lilies* murals, conceived as a unified meditation on nature and perception.

Awards & Accolades
Though Monet received no official honors comparable to state academies or medals, his cultural significance was widely acknowledged in his later years. In 1923, he underwent cataract surgery and continued to paint with renewed chromatic intensity. A year after his death on December 5, 1926, the Orangerie’s dedication of his *Water Lilies* cycle was hailed as a national tribute, cementing his legacy as the spiritual father of Impressionism.

Fun Fact
Monet was deeply involved in the design and cultivation of his garden at Giverny, treating it as a living studio. He imported bamboo, Japanese bridge designs, and specific water lily species, even negotiating with local authorities to divert a nearby river into his pond. The garden was not merely a subject but a fully realized artistic construct, meticulously orchestrated to serve his aesthetic inquiries.

Legacy
Monet’s radical redefinition of painting as an act of perceptual immediacy influenced generations of artists, from the Fauves’ expressive color to the abstract meditations of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. His serial method prefigured conceptual art’s interest in repetition and variation, while his immersive *Water Lilies* installations anticipated environmental and installation art. As a foundational figure in the shift from representation to abstraction, Monet reoriented painting toward subjective experience. His enduring presence in museums and popular imagination affirms his role as a visionary who transformed the way we see the natural world.