Impressionism began with a man obsessed by changing light
Oscar-Claude Monet (1840–1926) founded Impressionism and pushed painting toward modernism by chasing outdoor light. Raised in Le Havre, he returned again and again to the same motif—haystacks, poplars, Rouen’s cathedral, water lilies—so seasons and hours could rewrite the same view.
Born 14 November 1840 at 45 rue Laffitte in Paris, second son of Claude Adolphe and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, he grew up by the Normandy coast. His mother backed an art career; his father preferred the family grocery and shipping trade. At Le Havre’s arts school from 1851 he sold caricatures by fifteen, then learned open-air painting from Eugène Boudin and, later, Dutch mentor Johan Jongkind near Cap de la Hève.
Paris in 1859 meant the Salon and studios; conscription in 1861 sent the twenty-year-old toward military service until family money and mentors redirected him. He would document French countryside by serial campaigns: one motif, many canvases, each a different light. The Giverny property bought in 1890 soon sprouted a water garden that fed more than two decades of lily paintings, including a 1906 oil now emblematic of that late obsession.
Industrial modernity entered the work too. Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) puts iron sheds and steam where history painting once stood, aligning Monet with Impressionists who treated Paris’s new infrastructure as worthy subject. Loose handling and serial method made him a bridge from nineteenth-century naturalism toward twentieth-century abstraction of sensation.
He died 5 December 1926, having turned optical attention into a public movement’s name. What began as coastal sketches and rejected Salon battles ended as a global shorthand for seeing weather, hour, and reflection as the real drama of a painting.
Source: Claude Monet
