French Impressionist Painter, 1840-1926 Claude Oscar Monet (14 November 1840 C 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting. Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris . He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubree Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised into the local church parish, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François 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. On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. After several difficult months following the death of Camille on 5 September 1879, a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. Camille Monet had become ill with tuberculosis in 1876. Pregnant with her second child she gave birth to Michel Monet in March 1878. In 1878 the Monets temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hosched, (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in Vetheuil during the summer. After her husband (Ernest Hoschede) became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium, in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vetheuil; Alice Hosched helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children. They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880 Alice Hosched and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vetheuil. In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny. In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hosched married Claude Monet in 1892.   Related Paintings of Claude Monet :. | Grainstack in the Sunlight | Port Goulphar | Flower Beds at Vetheuil | A Meadow at Giverny | Study of a Figure Outdoors |
Related Artists:
Francisco Barrera
Spanish, 1595-1657,Spanish painter. Although he is sometimes thought to have been a Sevillian painter, his career is documented in Madrid. Barrera enjoyed considerable prestige and authority within the artistic community of the Spanish capital and in 1634 and 1639 represented his profession in significant legal battles concerning the status and rights of painters. However, Barrera's known paintings, all of which are still-lifes, are those of a derivative artist of modest abilities. In Still-life with Basket of Grapes, signed and dated 1642 (Florence, Uffizi), his arrangement of objects in a window-frame and on a stone ledge derives from works by Juan van der Hamen y Le?n but without that artist's refined compositional sense or mastery of pictorial space. The rather weak modelling of objects in this painting is consistent with Barrera's other still-lifes, which are further characterized by their light tonality, bland colouring and monotonous brushwork. Comparable stylistic features are found in the more accomplished still-lifes of Antonio Ponce, with whom Barrera is documented in the 1630s. Barrera's best works are those depicting the Four Seasons, signed and dated 1638 (Seville, priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., pp. 78-85). These are still-lifes of abundant seasonal foodstuffs and, in landscape settings, large symbolic and genre figures drawn from traditional iconography.
Jacques-Emile Blanche
(1 January 1861 - 20 September 1942) was a French painter born in Paris. His father was a successful psychiatrist who ran a fashionable clinic, and Blanche was brought up in the rich Parisian neighborhood of Passy in a house that had belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. Although he received some instruction in painting from Henri Gervex, he may be regarded as self-taught. He became a very successful portrait painter, with a style derived from 18th-century English painters such as Thomas Gainsborough as well as Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent. He worked in London, where he spent time from 1870 on, as well as Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon and the Sociate Nationale des Beaux-Arts. One of his closest friends was Marcel Proust, who helped edit several of Blanche's publications. He also knew Henry James and is mentioned in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Among the painter's most famous works are portraits of his father, Marcel Proust (Private collection, Paris), the poet Pierre Louÿs, the Thaulow family (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), Aubrey Beardsley (National Portrait Gallery, London), and Yvette Guilbert. He was the author of the unreliable Portraits of a Lifetime: the late Victorian era: the Edwardian pageant: 1870-1914 (London: J.M. Dent, 1937) and More Portraits of a Lifetime, 1918-1938 (London: J.M. Dent, 1939).
James Mcneill Whistler
American Painter and Printmaker, 1834-1903 James Abbott McNeill Whistler's deft brushwork and mighty ego made him one of London's best-known painters in the second half of the 1800s. Born in Massachusetts, Whistler spent most of his adult life in England and France, in an era when an American artist in Europe was something of a rarity. He specialized in landscapes and (especially later in his career) portraits; stylistically he is often linked with Claude Monet and August Renoir, though he was not exactly part of the Impressionist movement. His etchings also are highly regarded. Witty, cranky and a bit of a devil, Whistler was a regular gadabout in British society. He had a famous long-running feud with the playwright Oscar Wilde, each of them trying to outwit the other with cutting public remarks. Some critics of the era considered Whistler's work to be smudgy and too radical; after viewing Whistler's 1875 study of fireworks over the Thames, Nocturne in Black and Gold: the Falling Rocket, John Ruskin wrote: "I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler successfully sued Ruskin for libel but was awarded only a farthing in damages,