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Monday, March 17, 2014

Claude Monet

Painting of Monet
by Auguste Renoir
1875
"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."



— Claude Monet
French Painter
1840 - 1926






Commentary
Why did you become a painter, a writer or a storyteller? Why did you start playing music and composing songs? Why do you love to take photographs? What drives you to be creative? What is your story? I began writing poetry when I was a junior in high school and I submitted my early poems as a paper for a social studies seminar. My English teacher asked me why I had not shown them to her. At the time I had not made the connection between writing and English class. I wrote because it was a way to express my ideas on societal problems. Why are you an artist? I'd love to hear your story.

File:Claude Monet - Water Lilies - 1906, Ryerson.jpg
Water Lilies 1906
Biography
Claude Monet was born in Paris, France to Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubree Monet.  He was baptized as Oscar-Claude but his parents called him Oscar.  His father wanted him to enter the family grocery business but Monet wanted to be an artist.  When he was sixteen his mother died.  Monet moved to Paris and lived with his widowed, childless aunt.

When Monet was twenty, he joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria.  He was committed to serve for seven years but was discharged after two years because he had contracted typhoid fever.  

Woman in a Green Dress
by Claude Monet
Model is Camille Doncieux
1866.
In 1867, Camille Doncieux, a model, gave birth to Monet's first child.  They were married in 1870.  In 1879, Camille died from cancer at the age of thirty-two.

Monet was a founder of the Impressionist movement in France and was one of its most consistent and prolific artists.  The first Impressionist exhibition was held in 1874.  Renoir chaired the hanging committee and did most of the work himself.  Monet showed 11 paintings in the collection of 165.

Monet died of lung cancer at the age of 86.