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 :. | Au Bord de l-Eau,Bennecourt | Saint-Lazare Station | Port in Argenteuil | Willows in Haze,Giverny | Vue generale de Rouen |
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William Trost Richards
(June 3, 1833 - April 17, 1905) was an American landscape artist associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Trost Richards was born on 3 June 1833 in Philadelphia. In 1846 and 1847 he attended the local Central High School. Between 1850 and 1855 he studied part-time with the German artist Paul Weber while working as designer and illustrator of ornamental metalwork. Richards first public showing was part of an exhibition in New Bedford, Massachusetts, organized by artist Albert Bierstadt in 1858. In 1862 he was elected honorary member of the National Academy of Design and Academician in 1871. In 1863, he became a member of the Association of the Advanced of Truth in Art, an American Pre-Raphaelite group. In 1866, he departed for Europe for one year. Upon his return and for the following six years he spent the summers on the East Coast. In the 1870s, he produced many acclaimed watercolor views of the White Mountains, several of which are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Richards exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1861 to 1899 and at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1863 to 1885. He was elected a full member of the National Academy in 1871. Richards rejected the romanticized and stylized approach of other Hudson River painters and instead insisted on meticulous factual renderings. His views of the White Mountains are almost photographic in their realism. In later years, Richards painted almost exclusively marine watercolors. His works are featured today in many important American museums, including the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
John Opie
English Painter, 1761-1807,English painter. He was born in a tin-mining district, where his father was a mine carpenter. He had a natural talent for drawing and was taken up by an itinerant doctor, John Wolcot (the poet Peter Pindar, 1738-1819), who was an amateur artist and had a number of well-connected friends. Wolcot taught Opie the rudiments of drawing and painting, providing engravings for him to copy and gaining him access to country-house collections. Opie's early portraits, such as Dolly Pentreath (1777; St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, Lord St Levan priv. col.), are the work of a competent provincial painter and owe much to his study of engravings after portraits by Rembrandt. His attempts at chiaroscuro and impasto in Rembrandt's manner gave his pictures a maturity that clearly startled contemporary audiences expecting to see works by an untutored artist. Thus in 1780, when a picture by him was exhibited in London at the Society of Artists with the description 'a Boy's Head, an Instance of Genius, not having ever seen a picture', Opie was hailed as 'the Cornish Wonder'. When he himself arrived in London, where he was promoted by Wolcot and his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 and 1782, he was seen as a phenomenon, impressing even Joshua Reynolds, who is reputed to have remarked that Opie was 'like Caravaggio and Velasquez in one'.
Jean-Louis Forain
1852-1931 French painter, printmaker and illustrator. Around 1860 he moved with his family to Paris, where he was taught by Jacquesson de la Chevreuse (1839-1903), Jean Baptiste Carpeaux and Andre Gill. He participated in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and was a friend of the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; the latter is the presumed subject of a portrait (1874; priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., no. 1) that may have influenced Manet late portrait of Mallarme (1876; Paris, Louvre). Forain first met Manet through his friendship with Degas in the early 1870s at the salon of Nina de Callias. He continued to associate with Manet, meeting the group of young Impressionists at the Cafe Guerbois and the Cafe de la Nouvelle Athenes. In 1878 Forain painted a small gouache, Cafe Scene (New York, Brooklyn Mus.), which probably influenced Manet Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-2; London, Courtauld Inst. Gals).