15 Interesting Facts About Claude Monet

Do you want to know some interesting facts about Claude Monet?

Oscar-Claude Monet, better known as Claude Monet, was born in Paris, France, on November 14, 1840. Claude Monet was a French painter who pioneered the Impressionist movement and tirelessly promoted it throughout his career.

But there’s more behind the fame of this famous man and his art. With this article, we will unveil some interesting facts about Claude Monet.

15 Interesting Facts About Claude Monet

1. Claude Monet was born in Paris but raised in Normandy

Claude Monet moved to the Normandy coast with his family when he was five. There, Adolphe Monet, his father, took over the family’s ship-chandlering and grocery business.

The fact that Monet’s childhood was spent near the ocean and that he developed an intimate familiarity with the sea and the constantly changing Norman weather is significant for more than just biographical reasons.

2. Before he started painting, Monet made a name for himself as a caricaturist

When he was only 15 years old, Monet began selling his carefully observed and skillfully drawn caricatures.

During these years, he also drew pencil sketches of sailing ships that were so precise and detailed that they could have been used as technical blueprints.

Claude’s aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre was an amateur painter, so it’s possible she encouraged him to take drawing lessons from a professional.

3. Claude Monet served his military time in Algeria

Monet joined the First Regiment of African light Cavalry in 1861 at age 20.

Because Monet refused to give up painting as his father asked him to do, Adolphe didn’t buy him a 2,500-franc exemption from military service. However, the painter’s biographer claims that even in the midst of war, Monet was surrounded by natural light, sunshine, and vegetation that served as the inspiration for his art.

His military service came to a halt when he fell ill. Monet got out of service with his aunt’s help.

4. Monet and his peers started the Impressionist movement

In 1862, Claude Monet went to the studio of Swiss artist Charles Gleyre. He began to hone his visual vocabulary and method in the company of fellow artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley.

Monet, Renoir, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro, among others, had their works repeatedly rejected by the traditional Salon de Paris in 1874, so they banded together to form the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers and put on their own exhibition. It would be called “The First Impressionist Exhibition” in the future.

5. Claude Monet made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide by jumping into the Seine

Monet’s father disapproved of his relationship and career choices. He received no support, so he and his wife were poor when their first child was born.

Monet, distraught over his inability to provide for his family and the treatment he received from the French art establishments, jumped off a bridge into the Seine River.

Monet was depressed for the rest of his life, even though he overcame the obstacle and became one of the most famous painters of the late 19th century and early 20th century.

6. During the war between France and Prussia, he and his family had to leave France

It was in London that the Monet family found safe refuge in 1870.

Between these two periods, Claude Monet immersed himself in the works of English landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. At the same time, he met Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become his first art dealer.

The trip to Zaandam, Netherlands, from London began in 1871. He reportedly made 25 paintings while there and was investigated by police for revolutionary activities. A little later that year, he moved back to France, this time settling in Argenteuil.

7. Renoir painted Monet

In the summer of 1873, Monet stayed in a rented house in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. The artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir paid Monet a visit to spend time together painting in the great outdoors. Another interesting fact about Claude Monet was when Renoir painted Monet as he was painting in the garden, resulting in a painting within a painting.

Monet is depicted in this painting, simply titled Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, standing outside and painting a bouquet of flowers.

8. Monet’s first wife, Camille Monet (née Doncieux), was his favorite muse

In 1866, Monet’s painting La Femme à la Robe Verte (The Woman in the Green Dress) garnered him his first significant recognition. The exhibition was his first big success in Paris and featured his future wife, Camille Doncieux, then 19 years old.

It was in 1870 that they tied the knot. Sadly, Camille passed away at the age of 32, likely from pelvis cancer, not long after the birth of their second child. Some accounts say she died of tuberculosis.

After Camille’s death, a distraught Monet painted her final portrait while she was on her deathbed.

There was one controversial aspect to their story. It is said that when Camille became ill, Monet had an affair with Alice Hoschedé, a married woman whom he later married after Camille’s death.

9. Alice, Monet’s second wife, was jealous of Camille

Although Camille was still alive, Monet may have begun an affair with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a bankrupt businessman and art collector who had been staying with the Monets.

It wasn’t long after Camille’s death before rumors started spreading about Monet and Hoschedé’s relationship. After Hoschedé’s estranged husband passed away, the two were able to get married in 1892.

According to rumor, Alice was so jealous of Camille that she made Monet destroy all mementos and letters between the two. There is only one known surviving piece – a portrait in 1871 kept in a private collection.

10. He was a fan of Japanese art

Many Europeans, including Monet, were enticed by Japanese art in the second half of the 19th century. It is said that he was captivated by a Japanese exhibition in the 1890s.

Many of the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints that Monet amassed throughout his life are still on display at his Giverny home. His early work, such as La Japonaise in 1876, shows his fascination with Japanese culture.

11. Monet’s Giverny garden was created by rerouting a nearby river and importing exotic flowers

Monet painted in the gardens he had created at home that he purchased in the French village of Giverny in 1890.

Monet, a meticulous landscaper, gave daily instructions to the gardeners he had hired to implement his ideas.

In 1893, Monet diverted a local river to create a pond on his property, much to the astonishment of his neighbors. He planted South American and Egyptian water lily varieties in it.

His cattle farmer neighbors were worried that his new pond plants would pollute the water supply and kill their cattle. Officials in the area urged Monet to remove the lilies. Still, the artist disregarded their advice and used them as a significant source of creativity.

12. Monet’s greatest critic was himself

He slashed at least 15 of his water lilies canvases in 1908 for his Paris exhibition, which postponed his show. Monet had already destroyed or reworked many of the paintings he had made during the worst of his vision loss, so this was not an isolated incident.

13. Critics mocked Monet’s vision problem

Monet started having vision problems in his late 60s. Cataracts prevented him from seeing the full range of colors after his diagnosis in 1912. After losing his sight in 1922, he kept working as an artist by simply memorizing where each color was on his palette.

It wasn’t until 1923 that Monet underwent potentially risky cataract surgery after years of ridicule from critics who claimed his Impressionist style wasn’t a result of his talent but his deteriorating eyesight.

14. Monet’s home and garden are tourist attractions

Monet passed away in 1926 from lung cancer. Since 1980, visitors have been able to explore his former home and garden in Giverny and view his woodcut prints and personal mementos.

15. A Monet artwork was discovered recently

Another interesting fact about Claude Monet is when a London art dealer bought a painting by him at an auction in Paris in 2014, and in 2015 he discovered a pastel by the artist that he had not known existed.

The port of Le Havre, France, where Monet spent his childhood, is depicted in the pastel, along with its iconic lighthouse and jetty. Art historians proved the pastel to be a genuine Monet, who placed its creation around the time the artist jumped into the Seine in 1868.