Everything you want to know about Claude Monet – and more

Impressionism was an art movement which began in France, and a key figure of the movement was Claude Monet, one of the most celebrated artists of all time and a household name today. Monet’s rise to fame tells a tale of dogged determination and self-belief, of overcoming the odds and challenging conventions. Find out how he went from being a teenager called Oscar, selling charcoal caricatures for a few pennies to become of the highest paid artists in his lifetime. Everything you want to know about Claude Monet – and more…

Claude Monet’s early life

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris, in rue Lafitte in the 9^th arrondissement. When he was just a little boy, his family moved to the port city of Le Havre in Normandy. As a child he drew cartoons on his school books, signed them O. Monet and sold them (he later dropped the Oscar bit and became just Claude Monet). His dad didn’t want him to be an artist – he wanted him to take over the family grocery business.But luckily his mum supported him and little Claude started studying at art school when he was just eleven years. She died in 1857 when he was 16 years old, and Monet left home and returned to Paris to live with his aunt and continue studying art.

In 1861 he was drafted into the French army. He was sent to Algeria and was supposed to be in the army for 7 years. His dad, who was quite wealthy said he would buy him out of the army – which you could do in those days – but only if Claude would give up his silly ideas of painting and work in the grocery business. Monet refused. He caught typhoid and fortunately for him his aunt could afford to pay for him to be released – and she insisted he carry on with his art studies at university.

Monet wasn’t impressed by his teachers. In those days to be a success you had to follow rules of painting, formulas featuring ancient Greek and Roman scenes. Monet didn’t want to paint like everyone else though he was very good at the then conventional style of painting landscapes and portraits – nothing like the art we have come to know him for. He frequently went to Normandy to paint the scenery and there he fell in love with painting outside, en plein air, painting from life as it appeared before him.

Monet was a failure

At that time, an artist made his name by exhibiting at official salons run by official art academies, and artists generally sold their paintings through them. Monet wasn’t a massive success and rejection by the academies was frequent, though he did have some of his conventional paintings accepted. But earning a living from painting was hard, he was constantly broke. Some of his paintings were of his lover Camille. They had their first child, Jean in 1867. It wasn’t an easy life, they weren’t married, they were poor, they survived by borrowing money from friends and the occasional painting job. At one point Monet even went home to live with his father who gave him a small allowance. Even though he wasn’t a modest man and believed himself to be very talented, things got so bad that Monet decided to end it all and jumped off a bridge into the Seine in 1868.

When his father died in 1871, Monet didn’t even go to his funeral. By then he was living in London to avoid being sent back to join the army. After that he moved to Amsterdam. All the time he constantly painted – developing his own style, challenging the traditions of the art world. His dad, despite his unhappiness with Monet’s lifestyle, left him money in his will, and eventually Monet and Camille who was now his wife, finally got married in 1870, and moved back to France. The family lived on the outskirts of Paris, and he bought a boat on the river Seine and used it as a studio – he loved to paint the reflection of light bouncing off the water and the impressionistic style of painting became more and more important to him.

His new style of painting was completely unacceptable to the art salons of France. Painting after painting was rejected. And Monet wasn’t alone. This was also happening to Renoir, Cezanne, Degas and other artists who developed their own styles that didn’t follow convention. Frustrated by the rejection, a group of artists held their own exhibition – the year was 1874.

The birth of Impressionism

A total 165 works were shown at the exhibition, and around 3,500 people paid 60 francs each to see the works of art – but Monet’s painting which he named Impression: soleil levant, in English Impression: Sunrise did not sell. It was priced at 1,000 francs, about 2000 euros or 2,200 dollars in today’s money. A critic named Louis Leroy commented sarcastically that the painting was like an unfinished sketch, just an impression, impressionistic even. The name impressionist stuck, and a new school of art was born but it took several more years to become a success.

Monet’s family

Two years after that first exhibition, Camille was diagnosed with TB, and she became much sicker after their second son, Michel was born in 1878, and she died shortly after. Monet sat at her bedside and painted a final portrait, he later admitted that he was horrified at himself that despite being distressed, he was automatically noting the individual colours on her dead face (you can see the painting in the Musée d’Orsay).

Living with the Monet family at the time was a woman called Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a businessman and art collector who had gone bankrupt and run off. It seems that Monet may have started an affair with her before Camille died – and the fact that she destroyed all the photos of his former wife seems to indicate she was jealous. She had six kids (it’s said one of them was Monet’s) and they all carried on living with Monet and his two kids. They married in 1892 when her husband died.

Monet’s home in Giverny

Monet was travelling by train in 1883 to Paris, and the track ran along the bottom of a garden through the little village of Giverny in Normandy. When he spotted a house that he really liked the look of, he went back to have a look. In May 1883, he signed a rental agreement. There were orchards, a garden and a barn where Monet could paint. There was a school for the children in the village, and the surrounding countryside offered a variety of beautiful scenery to paint.

Monet’s paintings began to sell, and by 1890 he had earned enough to buy the house outright build a new art studio, extend the gardens and add a greenhouse. Monet became passionate about the gardens, creating scenes he wanted to paint. He would write daily instructions to a team of seven gardeners about the design, planting layouts and purchasing of new plants – roses poppies, apple trees – they turned it into his dream of a garden, bright colours like a living paint palette. He also grew a wide variety of aromatic Mediterranean herbs and vegetables, including rosemary, mint, courgettes, tomatoes and asparagus. He kept chickens in the garden – and today’s gardeners keep chickens there, keeping it authentic.

Monet lovingly decorated his house, choosing vivid hues to brighten the rooms, hanging Japanese prints on the walls throughout. There’s an airy, blue and white kitchen which looks onto a terrace where Monet welcomed guests on fine days. Monet was a bit of a foodie. He loved Périgord truffles and foie gras from Alsace. He loved lobster, fish and duck and garlicky mushrooms – all washed down with a good Sancerre from the Loire Valley.

His dining room was painted sunshine yellow, a really bright yellow a colour that spawned thousands of copycat kitchen/dining rooms around France. In fact at one point it was the most popular colour for French kitchens. When I bought my old farmhouse in northern France, the kitchen was Monet yellow. I’ve kept it yellow but a bit more of a mellow tone, that bright colour was a bit much in the morning for me!

Monet’s lily ponds

Ten years later a water meadow the other side of the train track at the bottom of the garden came up for sale and Monet bought it. There’s a road there now – no rail track. The artist threw himself into landscaping that area too, including the creation of the lily ponds which he would spend the last two decades of his life painting. He’d seen water lilies at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle – a world fair. Displayed in water gardens outside the Trocadèro, garden company Latour took first prize in the flower competition.

It was pure serendipity that Monet was exhibiting in the Pavillon des Artistes next door to the Trocadèro. He was totally beguiled by the waterlilies. “I love water, but I also love flowers. That’s why, once the pond was filled, I thought about adorning it with plants. I got a catalogue and simply chose at random”, he said. Latour garden centre, based in Le Temple-sur-Lot in the Lot-et-Garonne department (between Bordeaux and Toulouse) where he ordered the lilies from, are still going strong with their water lilies, and they kept the orders from Monet. Well you would wouldn’t you!

Monet adored his waterlilies. One of his gardener’s jobs was to paddle a boat onto the pond each morning, washing and dusting each lily pad. Once the lilies were clean, Monet began painting them, trying to capture what he saw as the light reflected off the water. Actually the gardeners who work there today still clean the lily leaves, you often spot them in their little wooden boat!

He put a Japanese footbridge across his pond, which he famously painted green, a colour now known as Monet green. He was very into Japanese art as were many artists of the time including Van Gogh. Monet’s house was full of Japanese prints. The local city council told him to remove the water lilies, they were scared that the foreign plants would poison the water, Monet ignored them. He was obsessed.

Monet’s success

Monet was his own harshest critic. By the late 1800s, his work was selling well. In 1908, a show of his work in Paris had to be postponed after he took a knife to at least 15 of his water lily paintings. His friend and former French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau told a journalist in 1927, “Monet would attack his canvases when he was angry. And his anger was born of a dissatisfaction with his work…he destroyed canvases in his quest for perfection.” Clemenceau was very much in awe of Monet and pulled strings in order to ensure that his tobacco, coal, or petrol supplies would not be disrupted during war.

Monet’s wife Alice died in 1911, and his oldest son Jean died in 1914, leaving his wife Blanche – who was also Alice’s daughter (yes she was Jean’s stepsister), to look after the ageing artist as his vision failed. Blanche was also a painter. By now Monet had became one of the highest paid artists in his lifetime.

Monet’s final years

Monet got cataracts when he was in his seventies. They affected his painting style enormously but he carried on and the day after the Armisitice of November 11, 1918, he offered the French State a series of enormous water lily paintings as a symbol of peace. They were installed according to his plan at the Orangerie Museum in Paris in a room he specially designed for them, though he never got to see this as he died a few months before.

He delayed risky cataract surgery and by 1922 he was classified legally blind. In 1923 he had surgery which restored the sight in his right eye. He refused to have surgery on his left eye and used special glasses with green lenses in order to start painting again. He even went over some of his pre-surgery works, making them more vivid, and often intensifying the shades of blue, though many of his works he destroyed, it’s thought up to 500 paintings in total.

When, in the summer of 1926, Monet was diagnosed with lung cancer. Georges Clemenceau, wrote to him, “What more could one ask for? You’ve had the best life that a man could dream of. There’s an art to leaving as well as entering.”

Monet died on December 5, 1926, at home, aged 86. Clemenceau refused to see him covered with a black cloth and replaced it with colourful, flowery curtains…

He was buried in Giverny churchyard. He died intestate, and his surviving son Michel inherited his entire estate. Michael didn’t have any children, and on his death in 1966, bequeathed the house and the gardens to the French Academy of Fine Arts. Over the years it has been restored, and in 1980, Monet’s former home was opened to tourists. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Giverny to walk through the artist’s famous garden and visit his house

Monet’s garden today

Visit the garden today and it looks not unlike it did in Monet’s lifetime. These days there is a team of eight gardeners who aim to keep it looking as it did after Monet’s 45 years of gardening there. And it really is recognisable from his paintings. What’s grown in the garden is chosen from a list of plants Monet liked to grow. Much of the detail comes from a book written by Monet’s son about his father’s letters which contained information about the plants he loved. And, there have been lots of studies of his paintings to work out which varieties he featured.

Monet captured his garden on canvas over and over. He would paint a section in the morning, paint it again at noon and again later in the day, fascinated by the change in colour. In those days paint didn’t come in tubes ready to use, artists mixed their own pigments. Monet would be mixing several times a day in his workshop, trying to get the colours as he saw them.

As you stroll the garden paths, birds sing, bees and insects flit about and always, there’s the aroma of blooming flowers. The famous “paint boxes”, oblong plots filled with flowers that the gardeners plant up to look like a palette of colours are spellbinding. You can easily imagine Monet using these beds to help him create the colours for his paint box.

“I must have flowers, always, and always” said Monet, and his legacy lives on in beautiful abundance in Giverny.

Janine Marsh is the author of several internationally best-selling books about France. Her latest book How to be French – a celebration of the French lifestyle and art de vivre, is out now – a look at the French way of life. Find all books on her website janinemarsh.com

You can hear a version of this article via The Good Life France podcast/Monet