Monet and His Mentor, Eugène Boudin

In the Orsay segment, we mentioned that the Naturalist painter Eugène Boudin is called Claude Monet's teacher. Here is how that came about.

Monet was born in Paris and moved at age five to Le Havre, a port city in northwestern France, where he started drawing. His first works weren't paintings as we know them but caricatures and satirical cartoons. Later, in Honfleur, a port town just south of Le Havre, he met a painter and took lessons from him. That painter was the Naturalist Eugène Boudin, famous as "the painter of skies and seas." Born in Honfleur and raised among its beautiful skies and sea, Boudin naturally gravitated toward landscape painting. Meeting him taught Monet that nature could be painted.

As mentioned earlier, when Monet was just starting out, nature was not considered a worthy subject. Academic art favored mythology, history and religion, themes with a meaning of their own, and nature, which is all around us, wasn't worth the effort. But once Boudin showed him that nature could be painted, Monet went to Paris to study in earnest.

What the studio taught there was academic art too. Monet had already realized he could paint nature and saw things differently, and he soon grew weary of that approach. Even in portraits, the studio taught that a perfect painting removed every flaw and depicted the subject flawlessly, and Monet didn't want to paint that way. If everything was going to look the same, he said, he would rather not paint, and he stormed out.

With friends he'd met at the studio, he headed to the Forest of Fontainebleau and began painting on the spot. One of them was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the famous Impressionist, and another was Bazille, who also served as a patron. The three finished their paintings right there, and that act is said to mark the beginning of Impressionism. We'll explain why in the next segment.