Claude Monet was once a very famous artist and still is after his death. As a child, he loved to draw in school while the teacher was giving a lesson. He had many pictures of his teachers that just made fun of what they did, and because of this many people in the town knew him very well for how well he drew. Later in life he would learn how to paint. His art form was called impressionism which at the time was looked down on because many of the current artist that worked on things such as realism. As a person, he had always loved the outdoors and that is what he based most of his art work on. He was so devoted to his work of the outdoors that when he went to Paris for several years he would see many artist go to the Louvre and copy the works of the old masters, but he would simply look out the window and paint what he saw. Even in his later life the outdoors was very important to him, as when he rented a home for his large family near Giverny which had two acres of land for him to paint. By looking at the outdoors that is how he learned many of the skills he used in impressionism. Camille Monet, his wife, was a huge inspiration in for him and in his art but when she and his son both died in the same year, he had a very hard time. This can be seen in his painting of his wife on her death bed, which compared to all of his other paintings, used dark shades of grey and black to portray his wife dying. One of his favorite things to paint were water lilies. He always looked at them in the water and loved how the light reflected and created a beautiful image.
|