Famous Artist: Claude Monet

The famous French Impressionist painter Monet was born in 1840. His full name was Oscar-Claude Monet, and he was baptized a Catholic in Paris. When he was 16, his mother died. His father wanted him to go into the family business, but Monet had received encouragement from his mother, who had been a singer, to pursue art. Monet moved around a great deal in his youth, spent some time in Africa with the French Cavalry, and eventually returned to Paris and made friends with other artists who, like him, wanted to embark on a new artistic method that would focus on color and light, and paintings that reflected the wonderful nature of the world as experienced by the painter. Monet liked to paint in the open air, and the style of Impressionism was born as a movement with his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise.

Monet married twice: his first wife died in her 30s, and the wife of a friend looked after his children. Later on, Monet would marry that woman too, once her husband died. For the first few decades of his life as a painter, Monet and his family were poorbut by the 1890s, the appeal of Impressionism had taken off, and Monet became wealthy enough to be able to buy home, land, develop an extensive garden and have an art studio all his own.

Monet suffered from cataracts in his later life, and his paintings in the 20th century reflect the change in his vision: they are less crisp, blurrier, and lack the snap and vitality of his most famous works. He died in 1926, and he was buried in Giverny. Today, he is remembered as the father of Impressionism, and his paintings sell for many millions of dollars to collectors around the world.

Monet lived through the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, but he did so by first moving to England with his family and then to the Netherlands. During that time he...…pond, and the light of the sky reflecting on the surface of the water between two islands of lily pads that float on the pond. It is like looking through a window of art onto nature itself; like stepping through a magical portal into the world that Monet inhabited. It is magic, and so few paintings have such effect. No matter how realistic a painting may be, the Impressionist works of Monet are more realistic in a way because they capture that ineffable brilliance found in nature that can only be captured through the kind of brightness of soul that Monetand perhaps Van Gogh and a few otherspossessed. Monets focus on color is really what gave him his power and art. I would rank him with Vermeer, the Dutch painter (who also resembles Rockwell), in terms of painters who used color to the best and most brilliant effect. And of course Van Gogh must also be in that group. But it is Monets garden scenes and water lilies…