Claude Monet à Giverny

Born in Paris in 1840, Claude Monet spent his youth years in Le Havre, Normandy, where his parents settled. Very talented for caricature, at the age of 17, he met Eugène Boudin, considered one of the forerunners of Impressionism, and who initiates him to paint.

At 19, he left for Paris after announcing to his father that he wanted to become a painter. He will spend a long period of financial difficulties there, his paintings being refused, despite a reputation acquired.

Rejected by the institutions because of their unacademic style, in 1874 Claude Monet and his painter friends founded the Society of Artists (Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Prins), Salon des Refusés, which exhibited on the sidelines of the Official Salon. It was on this occasion that the journalist Louis Leroy would ironize, in a pejorative way in front of Monet’s painting “Impression, Sun rising” that Monet and his friends were nicknamed the Impressionists.

At first, Monet and his friends will be seen as “cursed” artists who offend the sensibilities of the public and shoving the rules and the official environment if so much fun. The painter will receive his first order from the state in 1917, at the age of 77!

In 1880, Paul Durand-Ruel, an art dealer who promoted artists and organized numerous exhibitions in this network of galleries, in Paris, London, Brussels and New York, brought his confidence to Monet and sold his paintings.

In 1883, at the age of 43,  Monet returned to Normandy where he rented a house in a village, Giverny, which would remain his main residence until his murder, December 05, 1926.

In 1893, after the purchase of an adjacent piece of land, Monet will transform and expand its property in Giverny. He will create an water garden where he will produce a famous series of water lilies. So much in love and passionate about his garden, this one will inspire him and become his subject of the painting.