Claude Monet Art Prints

Oscar-Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris and grew up in the Normandy port of Le Havre, where local painter Eugène Boudin introduced him to painting outdoors directly from nature rather than composing in a studio. This plein air habit became the foundation of his entire career and, eventually, of Impressionism itself.

In the 1860s Monet studied in Paris and met fellow future Impressionists Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille. He married Camille Doncieux in 1870; she died of cancer in 1879. Financial hardship dogged him through the 1870s despite painting scenes like Impression, Sunrise, whose loose brushwork and casual title drew a critic's mocking coinage of 'Impressionism' in 1874 — a label the group adopted as its own.

From 1883 Monet rented, and later bought, a house at Giverny, where he built the water-lily pond and Japanese footbridge that dominated his art for his last three decades. Working in series to capture changing light and atmosphere, he produced hundreds of water lily canvases, some nearly blind from cataracts in his final years. He died at Giverny on December 5, 1926, at age 86.