November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926
The world of 19th Century art -- and certainly Impressionism -- would have been an entirely different landscape if Oscar-Claude Monet had become the grocer his father had originally wished him to be. Born to second-generation Parisians in the city's 9th arrondissement, Monet had a future as a family grocer carved out for him -- but his prodigious talent led him down other paths.
When he was 11 years old, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts, where his charcoal caricatures quickly became popular. Several years later, on the beaches of Normandy, he met artist Eugène Boudin, who mentored the young Monet in the art of oil painting and working "en plein air," or outdoors.
In his adult life, Monet and his friends and fellow artists Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley pioneered the Impressionist Art movement, which was characterized by the use of quickly executed, visible brushstrokes; the mutable effects of light; everyday scenes and subject matter. Impressionist artists often worked outdoors, and the movement took its name from this painting of Monet's entitled Impression, Sunrise.
Ironically, when art critic Louis Leroy inadvertently coined the term Impressionism, he meant it in a dismissive way. Yet the term endures today, along with the universally loved work of Monet and his Impressionist contemporaries.
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