Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a French Impressionist painter whose six-decade artistic career produced one of the foundational documents of late-19th and early-20th-century international Impressionist painting movement — particularly his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise (which gave the Impressionist movement its name) and his late-career Water Lilies series (across approximately 250 paintings produced at his Giverny estate across 1900–1926). He was born Oscar-Claude Monet on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, into a French middle-class family. His father Claude Adolphe Monet was a Le Havre grocer and his mother Louise Justine Aubrée was a homemaker. The 1845 family relocation to Le Havre, Normandy launched his early-career path.

His 1858 first encounter with French Norman landscape painter Eugène Boudin in Le Havre — across which Boudin introduced Monet to plein-air painting — produced his mid-1860s and 1870s plein-air painting practice. His 1859 Paris arrival and his subsequent 1859–1862 study at the Académie Suisse and the Atelier Charles Gleyre — alongside fellow students Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille — launched his early-career French painting public profile.

His 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise — which depicted the French Norman port of Le Havre — was exhibited at the April 15, 1874 First Impressionist Exhibition at the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The exhibition's adversarial critical reception by French art critic Louis Leroy (whose April 25, 1874 sarcastic review article in Le Charivari coined the term "Impressionism" as a derogatory dismissal of the show, derived from Monet's Impression, Sunrise title) produced the foundational name for the entire Impressionist movement.

His 1883 relocation to his Giverny, Normandy estate — and his subsequent 1893 acquisition of the adjoining Giverny pond and Japanese-inspired garden — produced his late-1890s and early-1900s Water Lilies series. The Water Lilies series — produced across approximately 250 paintings between 1900 and his 1926 death — has been continuously cited as one of the foundational documents of late-19th and early-20th-century international Impressionist painting. The eight large-scale Water Lilies panel paintings at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris (which Monet donated to the French government in 1922 and which were unveiled in 1927, six months after his death) produced his later international Impressionist-painting public profile. He died on December 5, 1926, at age 86, in Giverny, France, of lung cancer.

His name Claude derives from the Latin Claudius meaning "lame." Claude has been a popular American boys' name across the late 19th and 20th centuries.