Le panting claude francois biography

Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast.

Claude François ( - 17

He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature. When he was twenty-two, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the s.

Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. His first wife, Camille His landscapes chart journeys around the north of France His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir , who often painted alongside their host Following in the path of the Barbizon painters , who had set up their easels in the Fontainebleau Forest Whereas the Barbizon artists painted only preliminary sketches en plein air , Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio.

His quest to capture nature more accurately also prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.

In each series, Monet painted the same site again and again, recording how its appearance changed with the time of day. Light and shadow seem as substantial as stone in his Rouen Cathedral In , he reworked the canvases to their finished states. In the s and s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond