Monet example essay topic
408 words
Claude Oscar Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France. The artist spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. In Le Havre, when he was a teen, he studied drawing; he also painted seascapes outside with the French painter Eugene Louis Boutin. By the 1859, Monet had committed himself to being an artist, and in doing so he tried to spend as much time in Paris as he could possibly get. In the 1860's he became associated with the pre impressionist painter Edouard Manet, and with other French painters destined to form the impressionist school. Painting outside, Monet did simple landscapes and scenes of contemporary middle-class society, and started to have success at official exhibitions. But as his style developed, Monet violated one traditional artistic convention after another in the appeal of direct artistic expression. His experiments with rendering outdoor sunlight with a direct, sketch like application of bright color became more and more bold, he seemed to cut himself off from the possibility of a successful career as a conventional painter supported by the art establishment. In 1874 Monet and his colleagues decided to organize their own exhibition, to appeal directly to the public. They first called themselves independents, but then the media soon labeled them impressionists, because their work seemed like a first impression, and also that because one of his paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise.
From this time, Monet's compositions are extremely loosely structured, and the color was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking had been attempted. Inthe 1870's and 1880's Monet gradually refined this technique. By the mid-1880's Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris. There he began to construct a water garden-a lily pond arche with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo. Beginning in 1906, paintings of the pond and the waterlilies occupied him for the remainder of his life (now open to public).
Despite failing eyesight, Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny. Some people say that Monet brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression.
