CLAUDE MONET

Born in Paris in 1840, after an adolescence passed in drawing portraits in pencil and graphite, caricatures of most illustrious personalities of the capital, he meets the painter Eugene Boudin who becomes his first real teacher. With him the young Monet learns of the importance , the force and the vivacity of touch of the painting En plien air. He meets Delacroix , Courbet and Pissarro, studies in depth the works of Manet, having little interest in the classics of the history of art and academic teaching which bridles immediacy an perception of the countryside. In 1871 in London he comes in contact with the painting of Turner and Constable. April 25th 1874, with the group called Societè anonyme des peintres, sculputeres et graveurs to which among others Cezanne, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, Pissaro and Sisley belonged, he inaugurates an exhibition in the studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris in the Boulevard des capucines. On this occasion Monet exhibits the paintingImpression-Soleil levant. It is from this work, not without irony, that the critic Louis Leroy will derive the term Impressionism. In 1883 he moves to a cottage in Giverny, where he will organize a real garden-laboratory. He He works hard, almost obsessively, and in this period he produces some of his most important masterpieces, La cathèdrale de Rouen, Les peupliers, Les nymphèes,Effets d'eau. In 1899 begins the series of Le nymphèes which will accompany him to the end of his life and in the autumn of the same year he is in London to paint the views of the Thames. In the works of this last period, he seems to give space to the phantasy, inMaisons du parlement, Londres(1904), the most loved English fog, he seems to melt forms gradually in the direction of whirling perception which distances itself slowly from the object observed.. In 1920 he donates to the French state twelve canvasses of Les nymphèes, immense works, about four metres long, which will be exhibited in the Museum of the 'Orangerie of Paris, only a year after his death, in 1927 at Ginervy.