AN APPRECIATION: Claude Monet
(Part I The Early Years)

​ Claude Monet is one of the great figures in art. A prolific painter, his numerous canvases capture the beauty and life that are the hallmarks of the Impressionist approach to art. He was the artistic leader of the Impressionists. You cannot read a biography of the other Impressionists that does not recount his or her interaction with Monet. However, his art evolved beyond Impressionism, laying the foundation for abstraction and Modern Art.

Monet's career can be divided into three parts. In this article, we look at the early part of his life during which Monet developed his style and the stage was set for his later achievements.

Early Influences

Monet was born on November 14, 1848 in Paris. However, five years later, Monet's father, a prosperous merchant, moved the family to Le Havre in order to operated a wholesale grocery and ship's chandler business.

Inasmuch as his father's first name was also Claude, the young boy was known as Oscar during this period. Early on, Oscar demonstrated an interest in drawing and art and was given drawing lessons from Jacques-Francois Ochard, who had been a student of the classical artist Jacques-Louis David. Oscar set his sights on becoming an artist.

His father wanted his son to follow him into the family business. However, the elder Monet tolerated the boy's interest in art as Oscar's caricatures of prominent locals were quite popular and produced an additional stream of money for the family.

Oscar sold his caricatures by displaying them in shops in Le Havre and nearby communities. One of these shops was a framing shop operated by the family of artist Eugene Boudin. Monet's encounter with Boudin had a great influence on Monet and on the course of art.

Even though the caricatures produced income, Boudin advised the teenager to stop drawing them and become a landscape painter. Furthermore, Boudin advocated plein air painting, where the artist would go outdoors and paint what he saw directly rather than try and recreate it in the studio. Monet was skeptical but when he accompanied Boudin on an outdoor expedition, Monet became hooked. “It was as if a veil was torn from my eyes; I understood what painting could be,” he later said. “If I have become a painter, I owe it to Eugene Boudin.”

Monet's early landscape painting was also encouraged by Johan Barthold Jongkind, a Dutch painter, who was painting seacsapes in Normandy. Jongkind's style was a forerunner of Impressionism. “He was my real master; to him I owed the final education of my eye.”

In 1861, Monet's career as an artist was interrupted when he was drafted into the military. At that time, conscripts could avoid serving if they paid a sum to the government. While this practice was not uncommon among people of Monet's class, Monet's father refused to give his son the money to “buy his way out” because of his insistence on becoming an artist. Monet was assigned to the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry and deployed to Algeria. He was supposed to be there for seven years but after only a year, Monet was back in France on sick leave, a victim of typhoid fever. At this point, his father, possibly at the urging of Monet's aunt with whom he had been living since the death of his mother in 1857, relented and paid the money needed to relieve Monet of his military obligation.

On to Paris

A condition his father attached to the buy-out payment was that Monet undertake a formal course of training in the studio of an established artist. Monet chose the studio of Charles Gleyre in Paris. Although Gleyre was an academic artist trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (“the Academy”), Glyere allowed his students the flexibility to depart from the principles espoused at the Academy.

The Academy had very conservative notions about art. It promoted a hierarchy of subject matter in which “history paintings” (i.e., paintings of historic events, stories from the Bible or Greek and Roman myths) were at the top. Landscapes were at or near the bottom. Furthermore, the Academy had rules as to technique - - paintings had to be meticulously worked and highly polished with no brush marks.

Not everyone agreed with the Academy. Earlier in the century, Eugene Delacroix had successfully challenged the art establishment. More recently, Gustave Courbet and the Realists eschewed history painting in favor of painting modern life. Jean-Bapiste-Camille Corot and the artists of the Barbizon School were painting plein air landscapes. However, the most notorious rebel was Edouard Manet who caused public scandals with his choices of subjects and his technique, which was viewed as unfinished by the art establishment. Monet, along with a number of young artists he met at Glyere's studio including, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille, were firmly in the revolutionary camp.

The problem was that despite the rebels, the Academy nonetheless ruled the art world. Every year, the French government would hold an art exhibition known as the Paris Salon. As a practical matter, if you wanted to become a successful artist, you had to have your work exhibited at the Salon. Government commissions flowed to artists who had their work shown at the Salon and exhibiting at the Salon placed an official stamp of approval on an artists's work that reassured collectors looking to purchase art. While anyone could submit a work for the Salon, the jury that decided whether to accept a work and where to hang a painting if it was accepted was dominated by academicians. If your work did not conform to the principles of the Academy, it was likely to be rejected or hung where it was unlikely to be noticed..

Monet along with his friends from Glyere's studio and other avant garde artists including Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas would gather at places such as the Cafe Guerbois to discuss this problem and debate other issues relating to art. There must be alternative ways of getting your work before the public. Perhaps it would be helpful to  form a co-operative that would provide mutual assistance. Bazille suggested that the cooperative could also hold exhibitions of its members works. However, in the late 1860s, these ideas remained just talk.

Meanwhile, Monet and his friends concentrated on getting their pictures shown at the Salon. In 1865, the Salon accepted two of Monet's seascapes. This success encouraged him to try a quite ambitious project. Two years earlier, Manet had shocked Paris with a painting of a picnic called “Dejeuner sur l'Herbe”. Borrowing Manet's title, Monet produced his own picture of a picnic but in Monet's picture, unlike Manet's, no one was naked. His vision was to produce a picture on a monumental scale that would not only be accepted but which would be sure to be noticed at the Salon.

However, Monet found that he could not finish the painting to his satisfaction. Such big canvases made it difficult to achieve the directness and immediacy that so attracted him to plein air painting. Taking a break from this project, Monet left the rolled up canvas with an innkeeper as security for a debt. The innkeeper stored it in a damp place and part of the canvas rotted. As a result, it was never shown at the Salon and only fragments of the painting exist today.

Instead of the epic picnic picture, Monet submitted a painting to the Salon of a woman in a green dress. It was accepted and well-received. However, the style of the picture owed much to Manet and Manet became convinced that this young unknown artist was trying to capitalize on the similarity of their names. However, when the two actually met, Manet changed his mind and they became firm friends.

Monet's next major project again involved painting a picture on a monumental scale. In fact, the eight-foot high canvas for “Women in a Garden” was so big that Monet had to have it lowered into a trench so that he could paint the upper sections of the canvas. All of this effort was for naught as the picture was rejected by the Salon.

During this period, Monet had pictures accepted by the Salon in 1865, 1866 and 1868. However, his submissions were rejected in 1867, 1869 and 1870. This hit-and-miss record discouraged Monet and he did not submit any more paintings to the Salon during the 1870s.

An alternative path

Monet's favorite model during this period was his mistress Camille Doncleux. Among other works, she appeared in “Dejeuner sur L'Herbe” and “Woman in a Green Dress.” and was the model for all of the women in “Women in a Garden” Camille gave birth to their first child, Jean, in 1867.

When Monet's father learned that his son had a mistress, he stopped the allowance he had been sending him. Since Monet was not selling many paintings and not a good money manager, he was always short of money. He spent part of this period living and working in Bazille's studio. He also borrowed money from Bazille and other friends.

Monet and Camille were honeymooning in Trouville when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870. Like a number of other French artists, Monet fled with his family to London thus avoiding the hardships and destruction during the Siege of Paris. He found London inspiring and painted scenes of the Thames and various places around the city. Together with Pissarro who was also a refugee in England, Monet would go to museums and galleries where they were exposed to the English landscape artists John Constable and JMW Turner. Another refugee in London was the French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who would come to play a major role in promoting the work of Monet and his colleagues. 

After a short time living in Zaandam in the Netherlands, the Monet family returned to France in late 1871. Monet found that little had changed to make life easier for unknown artists. Indeed, the jury at the Salon had become even more conservative viewing anything avant garde as carrying the smell of the revolutionary Paris Commune, which had governed the city for a short period following the fall of the Second Empire and which was suppressed after a civil war.

As a result, the idea of forming an artist's co-operative resurfaced. Monet worked with Pissarro to form a joint stock company.  For its charter, the two artists borrowed from the charterof the baker's guild in Pontoise, the town where Pissarro was living at the time. Most of the artists who socialized at the Cafe Geurbois subscribed to the Society anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs.

By 1874, the old idea of having a group exhibition had also been revived. Bazille had been killed during the war but a core group including Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Degas and Berthe Morisot worked to make the idea reality. Although not a catchy name, it was agreed that the exhibition would use the name of the joint stock company. However, at Degas' suggestion, the exhibition was open not just to members of the joint stock company but also to more established artists working in various different styles. The presence of such artists might make the critics and the public take the exhibition more seriously. Besides the purpose of the exhibition was not to promote a particular style but rather to establish an alternative to the Salon. They also invited the group's hero Manet to participate but he declined explaining that his chosen battlefield for changing the art world was the Salon. James McNeill Whistler, who was producing his own brand of revolutionary art. also declined to participate.

The group found space for their exhibition at the studio of Parisian photographer Nadar. Thirty artists participated showing 165 works.

Monet showed five oil paintings and seven pastels. These included a variety of styles ranging from the large Manet-inspired “Luncheon” to more avant garde works that were smaller,  less finished and which incorporated brighter colors.

In the latter category was an oil painting presenting a view of Le Havre harbor. Renoir was in charge of hanging the paintings at the exhibition but he had tasked his brother to prepare the catalogue. Repeatedly asked for the title of his view of Le Havre, Monet finally told Edmund to call it “Impression: Sunrise.”

The critics were not impressed by the exhibition. Louis Leroy was particularly offended by the unfinished-looking “Impression: Sunrise” and so in his review of the exhibition he scorned that Monet and his colleagues were just a bunch of “Impressionists.”

The First Impressionist Exhibition was not a financial success either. Indeed, the liabilities it incurred forced the artists to wind up the joint stock company.

Still the exhibition was not a complete failure either. The group had been noticed not only by the critics but by the public and as has often been said there is no such thing as bad publicity. Furthermore, there still was no alternative to the Salon. So after a short time to lick their wounds, Monet and his friends decided to keep trying.

Click here for Part II of our profile of Monet

See our profiles of these other Impressionists and members of  their circle.

Frederic Bazille
Eugene Boudin
Marie Bracquemond
Gustave Caillebotte
Mary Cassatt
Paul Cezanne
​Edgar Degas
​Henri Fantin-Latour
​Eva Gonzales
Paul Gauguin
Armand Guillaumin​
Edouard Manet
​Berthe Morisot
​Camille Pissarro
Pierre Auguste Renoir
Alfred Sisley
​​Suzanne Valadon
​Victor Vignon
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Monet's landscape style evolved during his early years from an almost traditional style in "View of Roulles, Le Harve" in 1858 (above) to the more Impressionistic "Breakwater at Trouville" in 1870 (below).

In the mid-1860s, Monet sought to impress the Salon with two monumental size paintings.  "Le Dejuner sur l'herbe" (above) was damaged and never submitted to the Salon.  "Women in a Garden" (below) was rejected by the Salon.

Monet had better success with "Woman in a Green Dress" (above) but its similarity to the work of Edouard Manet angered Manet.

Two paintings from 1867, "Garden at Sainte-Adresse" (above) and "Woman in a Garden" (below).

The paintings Monet showed at the First Impressionist Exhibition varied in style.  "The Luncheon" (above) is in the style Monet used in the mid-1860s and which he would later abandon.  "Boulevard des Capuines" looks to the future.   

Above: "Impression: Sunrise,"  the painting that inspired a critic to label Monet and his colleagues "Impressionists," is Monet at his most abstract. 

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Artist appreciation - Claude Monet (Part I The Early Years)