Biography of famous people

Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church,Notre Dame de Lorette, as Oscar Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
On the first of April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques Francois Ochard, a former student of Jacques Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857, he met fellow artist Eugene Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan Barthold Jonkind .
On 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

In 1870, Claude Monet married his wife, Camille, and the two traveled to London and eventually settled at Argenteuil. His best-known, most popular works were produced during this time at Argenteuil, where he often painted alongside Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte, and Manet. Monet regularly exhibited his paintings in the private Impressionist group shows, which first took place in 1874. During that first show his painting Impression: Sunrise (1872) inspired a hostile newspaper critic to call all the artists "Impressionists," a name that persists to characterize the artistic movement today.

Camille Monet died in 1879 and Claude remarried in 1892 to Alice Hoschedé. After decades of relative poverty, the artist was completely secure financially by 1899. It was then that he began his famous series of water lily paintings at Giverny. The works themselves were revolutionary, 12 large canvases that required the artist to learn an entirely new style of painting characterized by broad, sweeping strokes. He worked on the paintings exhaustively, despite poor health and double cataracts, until his death on December 5, 1926.