Young Monet: The Father of Impressionism

On the way to Giverny, here's a little of Monet's story.

Monet was born in Paris, but his family moved to Le Havre when he was five, and he spent his childhood and youth there. As a teenager he became a local sensation with caricatures of the town's notables. Workers earned about 5 francs a day at the time, and he sold each drawing for 10, which made for a tidy income. In his late teens, Eugène Boudin, known as the "painter of the coast," took him on as a student, setting Monet on the path to becoming an artist. Boudin taught him oil painting and urged him to paint landscapes and seascapes outdoors. Believing that a work painted on the spot has a vigor and vitality that studio pieces lack, Monet roamed the Normandy coast sketching what he saw, which is why these painters are also known as the plein-air school.

Monet arrived in Paris in 1859 and mixed with Renoir, Bazille and Sisley at the Gleyre studio. The four of them sometimes worked together in the Forest of Fontainebleau. He went on to meet Courbet and Charles-François Daubigny and worked alongside them, so he had a wide circle of acquaintances. His early work, influenced by Courbet and Manet, focused on figures, but he gradually shifted toward bright, open-air landscapes. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out he fled to London, where seeing works by British landscape painters such as Turner and Constable sharpened his handling of color.

In 1871 he settled in Argenteuil, a leisure spot on the Seine just outside Paris, and painted the many scenes of this area as it modernized and industrialized. To follow nature's changes, he even floated a boat on the Seine and used it as a studio. In 1874 he submitted 12 works to the exhibition of the "Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs," and it was from the title of one of them, Impression, Sunrise, that Monet's circle got the name "Impressionists." It is one of his best-known paintings. At the time, though, the label was meant as an insult, aimed at Monet and others for supposedly abandoning the tools of traditional painting.

It's said that no painter loved and longed for light as Monet did. The hazy morning mist, a sea tinted by sunrise, poplars glittering like silver scales in the sun, and nature changing its clothes moment by moment with the light all cast a spell on him that never wore off. He celebrated the beauty of things as light transforms them rather than striving to create forms close to their essence. He believed a painter should depict only what actually exists before the eyes, and he would not accept alteration by imagination in any form.

From 1878 he left Paris and his Impressionist friends and settled in Vétheuil, where his partner Camille died in 1879. In the bitter cold he worked only indoors, and the still lifes of flowers and fruit from this period carry a tone of sorrow and despair not seen in his earlier work. By early 1883 he had begun to win recognition and enjoy financial comfort, and that spring he moved to Giverny with his second wife, Blanche Hoschedé, and the children. Captivated by the beautiful garden, he bought the house in 1890. It's the very place you're about to visit.