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Numerous portraits of Monet have survived from various stages of his life – self-portraits, the works of his friends (Manet and Renoir among others), as well as photographs by Carjat and Nadar.

The Painter with a Pointed Hat

Drawing

Many literary descriptions of Monet’s physical appearance have come down to us as well, particularly after he had become well-known and much in demand by art critics and journalists. In 1919, when Monet was living almost as a recluse at Giverny, not far from Vernon-sur-Seine, he had a visit from Fernand Léger, who saw him as “a short gentleman in a panama hat and elegant light-grey suit of English cut… He had a large white beard, a pink face and little eyes that were bright and cheerful but with perhaps a slight hint of mistrust…”

The Towing of a Boat in Honfleur

1864

Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 82 cm

Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

New York

Mouth of the Seine River in Honfleur

1865

Oil on canvas, 90 × 150 cm

Norton Simon Museum

Pasadena, California

Both the visual and the literary portraits of Monet depict him as an unstable, restless figure. Monet’s abrupt changes of mood, his constant dissatisfaction with himself, his spontaneous decisions, stormy emotions and cold meticulousness, his consciousness of himself as a personality moulded by the preoccupations of his age, set against his extreme individualism – taken together these features elucidate much in Monet’s creative processes and attitudes towards his own work. Claude-Oscar Monet was born in Paris on 14 November, 1840, but all his impressions as a child and adolescent were linked with Le Havre, the town where his family moved in about 1845.

The Pavé de Chailly in the Forest of Fontainebleau

1865

Oil on canvas, 97 × 130 cm

Ordrupgaardsamlingen

Charlottenlund-Copenhagen

Bazille and Camille (Study for the “Luncheon on the Grass”)

1865

Oil on canvas, 93 × 68.9 cm

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

The surroundings in which the boy grew up were not conducive to artistic studies: Monet’s father ran a grocery business and turned a deaf ear to his son’s desire to become an artist. Le Havre boasted no museum collections of significance, no exhibitions, and no school of art.

Woman in a Green Dress (Camille)

1866

Oil on canvas, 231 × 151 cm

Kunsthalle, Bremen

The gifted boy had to content himself with the advice of his aunt, who painted merely for personal pleasure, and the directions of his school-teacher. The most powerful impression on the young Monet in Normandy was made by his acquaintance with the artist Eugène Boudin.

Boats in the Port of Honfleur

1866

Oil on canvas, 49 × 65 cm

Private collection

It was Boudin who discouraged Monet from spending his time on the caricatures that brought him his initial success as an artist, and urged him to turn to landscape painting. Boudin recommended that Monet observe the sea and the sky and study people, animals, buildings and trees in the light, in the air.

Luncheon on the Grass

1866

Oil on canvas, 130 × 181 cm

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Moscow

He said: “Everything that is painted directly on the spot has a strength, a power, a sureness of touch that one doesn’t find again in the Studio.” These words could serve as an epigraph to Monet’s work.

Women in the Garden

1866

Oil on canvas, 256 × 208 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Monet’s further development took place in Paris, and then again in Normandy, but this time in the company of artists. His formation was in many ways identical to that of other painters of his generation, and yet at the same time his development as an artist had profoundly distinctive individual features.

Garden in Blossom

About 1866

Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Monet preferred current exhibitions and meetings with contemporary artists to visiting museums. A study of his letters provides convincing evidence that contact with the Old Masters excited him far less than the life around him and the beauties of nature.

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

1867

Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 102.5 cm

Art Institute of Chicago

What, then, did particularly strike Monet during his first trip to Paris in 1859? An exhaustive reply is found in his letters to Boudin from Paris after his visit to the Salon. The young provincial passed indifferently by the historical and religious paintings of Boulanger, Gérôme, Baudry and Gigoux; the battle-scenes depicting the Crimean campaign do not attract him at all; even Delacroix, represented by such works as The Ascent to Calvary, St. Sebastian, Ovid, The Abduction of Rebecca and other similar subject paintings, seems to him unworthy of interest.

1867

Lady in the Garden Sainte-Adresse (Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden)

Oil on canvas, 80 × 99 cm

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

The Lunch

1868

Oil on canvas, 230 × 150 cm

Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie

Frankfurt

Corot on the other hand is “nice”, Theodore Rousseau is “very good”, Daubigny is “truly beautiful”, and Troyon is “superb”. Monet called on Troyon, an animal and landscape painter whose advice Boudin had earlier found valuable.

Portrait of Madame Gaudibert

1868

Oil on canvas, 216 × 138 cm

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Troyon made recommendations which Monet relayed in his letters to Boudin – he should learn to draw figures, make copies in the Louvre, and should enter a reputable studio, for instance that of Thomas Couture. Monet thus immediately identified the figures who would provide his artistic guidelines.

At the Water’s Edge, Bennecourt

1868

Oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm

The Art Institute of Chicago

These were the landscapists of the Barbizon school, who had pointed French landscape painting towards its own native countryside; Millet and Courbet, who had turned to depicting the work and way of life of simple people; and, finally, Boudin and Jongkind, who had brought to landscape the freshness and immediacy lacking in works of the older generation of Barbizon painters.

La Grenouillère

1869

Oil on canvas, 75 × 100 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York

Monet was to paint alongside several of these masters – Boudin, Jongkind, Courbet (and Whistler, too) – and by watching them at work he would receive much practical instruction. Although Monet did not regard with great favour his immediate teacher Charles Gleyre, whose studio he joined in 1862, his stay there was by no means wasted, for he acquired valuable professional skills during this time.