Claude Monet essays

Claude Monet essays Claude Monet was a French landscape painter and a founder of impressionism. He held onto his belief of his painting style throughout his long career and is considered to be the most consistently representative painter of that time. He is also one of the leading painters of landscapes in the history of art. Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840 but spent his early life in Le Havre. Monet loved to draw and spent much of his time sketching caricatures of people. He met a marine painter named Boudin, who encouraged him to paint out doors in the open air, a practice he never gave up. In 1860, he joined with the army in Algeria, after two years he went to Paris, although his parents objected, to study painting under Charles Gleyre. Monet disliked the classical school of painting, which was then popular and joined several other artists whose ideas agreed with his own. Monet made several lasting friendships with the artists who would later become known as the Impressionists. They included Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. Monet and several of his friends painted for a time out-of-doors in the Barbizon district. Monet felt he could not express himself in the formal traditions and began to paint things as he saw them. He paid little attention to the detail of his subject, but tried to capture the effects of light and air. Monet soon began to concentrate on his lifelong objective, painting the variations of lights and shadows that are brought on by the changes of time through out the day and the seasons. Instead of copying the classical style of painting, which was a traditional practice of young artists of that time, Monet learned from his friends, from the landscape itself, and from the works of his older peers, Manet, Corot, and Courbet. Monet's representation of light was based on his knowledge of the laws of optics as well as his own observations of his subjects. He often showed natural color by breaking i...