Article: Claude Monet: A Life Chasing Light, From Le Havre to the Water Lilies

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Claude Monet: A Life Chasing Light, From Le Havre to the Water Lilies

Patchwork of fifteen paintings by Claude Monet: sunsets and misty mornings on the Seine and at Pourville, haystacks in the snow, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the Doge’s Palace and the Palazzo Dario in Venice, and water lilies

Fifteen of Monet’s paintings, from the Seine and the Normandy coast to London, Venice and the water lilies: The Seine at Lavacourt (1879), Sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect (1880), Sunset at Pourville, Open Sea (1882), Misty Morning at Pourville (1882), Morning Haze (1888), Haystacks, Effect of Snow and Sun (1891), Rouen Cathedral Façade and Tour d'Albane, Morning Effect (1894), The Seine in the Mist (1894), The Cliff at Pourville (1896), Water Lilies (c. 1897–1899), Houses of Parliament, London (1900), The Doge's Palace Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (1908), The Doge's Palace (1908), Palazzo Dario (1908) and Water Lilies (c. 1915–1926).

A woman on a windy hill, her parasol tilted against the clouds. A pond covered with flowers, painted so close that the sky only appears as a reflection. A cathedral turning blue, then gold, then grey. Claude Monet spent sixty years in front of the same few things, the sea, a river, a field, a garden, and never painted the same picture twice. What changed from one canvas to the next was the light, and the light was what he was really looking at.

He was not a man of theories. "I am simply trying to do my best to express what I feel in front of nature," he once wrote. So rather than a lecture on Impressionism, this is a journey through the places where he lived and worked, from the harbour where he grew up to the water garden where he died. Every painting mentioned along the way is part of our Monet prints and posters.

Le Havre: Caricatures and a Lesson in Sky (1840–1862)

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, but he grew up in Le Havre, where his father ran a grocery and ship-supply business at the mouth of the Seine. He was a poor student and a gifted doodler. As a teenager he drew caricatures of the town's notables and sold them for ten or twenty francs each, displayed in the window of a local frame maker.

In that same window hung small seascapes by Eugène Boudin, a painter who worked outdoors on the beaches of Normandy. Boudin noticed the boy's drawings and invited him to come and paint with him. Monet later said that it was as if a veil had been torn away: from Boudin he learned that you have to paint the sky and the sea as they are, on the spot, before they change. You can still feel that lesson in his early night piece, Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight, or in a small landscape of the mid-1860s where three quarters of the canvas is sky.

In 1861 he was called up for military service and sent to Algeria with a cavalry regiment. He caught typhoid and came home after a year, but the African light stayed with him. His aunt paid for his release from the army on one condition: that he study painting seriously in Paris.

Black and white portrait photograph of Claude Monet by Nadar, 1899: the painter with a long grey beard, in a dark jacket

Claude Monet photographed by Nadar in 1899, the year of his first paintings of the Japanese footbridge at Giverny.

Honfleur and Fontainebleau: A Gang of Friends (1862–1866)

In Paris, Monet entered the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre, mainly to please his family. What he really found there was a group of friends: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. They escaped as often as they could to paint in the open air, in the forest of Fontainebleau or on the Normandy coast.

The summers at Honfleur, with Boudin and the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, gave us The Beach at Honfleur and the sunny Rue de la Bavole. In Fontainebleau, in 1865, he painted the huge Bodmer Oak while working on an enormous picnic scene that he never finished. The same year he met Camille Doncieux, a young model who would become his companion and then his wife. Her portrait in a green dress was accepted at the Salon of 1866 and earned him his first good reviews.

Sainte-Adresse, Étretat and the Lean Years (1867–1871)

His family did not approve of Camille, and when she became pregnant in 1867, Monet spent the summer with his relatives at Sainte-Adresse, near Le Havre, while she gave birth to their son Jean in Paris. That summer produced some of his brightest early pictures: the terrace of the Garden at Sainte-Adresse with its flags snapping in the wind, the Regatta at Sainte-Adresse and the beach and its fishing boats.

The years that followed were desperately poor. Monet moved from one rented room to another, at Bennecourt, Fécamp, Étretat and Bougival, often unable to buy paint. Yet this is when his style truly took shape. Look at Camille sitting on the bank of the Seine at Bennecourt, the dark boat aground at Fécamp, or The Green Wave with its almost black sea. In the winter of 1868 to 1869 he painted The Magpie, a field of snow full of blue shadows with a single black bird on a gate. The Salon rejected it. Today it is one of the most loved paintings in the Musée d'Orsay.

In the summer of 1869, he and Renoir set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillère, a bathing spot on the Seine near Bougival. To catch the flickering water, they used quick, separate strokes of pure colour. Many historians see those few canvases as the moment Impressionism was born. A few months later came the Seine at Bougival at dusk and a little train crossing the countryside.

Monet married Camille in June 1870. A month later, France declared war on Prussia. To avoid being drafted, he fled to London, where he discovered Turner and Constable and met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would support him for the rest of his life. On his way home in 1871, he stopped in Holland and painted the green and pink wooden houses by the River Zaan and the Achterzaan.

Regattas at Argenteuil by Claude Monet: white sailboats and their reflections on the Seine

Regattas at Argenteuil (c. 1872): quick strokes of white and blue, painted on the spot.

Argenteuil: The Sunniest Years (1871–1878)

At the end of 1871 the family settled in Argenteuil, a small town on the Seine a quarter of an hour by train from Paris. On weekends, Parisians came to sail; during the week, new factories were going up along the banks. Monet painted both, with the same open eye.

He bought a boat and fitted it with a little cabin, a floating studio from which he could paint right on the river. From it came the regattas, the basin with its promenade, the road bridge and the railway bridge, on a grey day and under a deep blue sky. At home there was a garden full of dahlias, where little Jean played with his hoop or rode his hobby horse, and where Camille could be found at her embroidery.

In 1873, on a hillside above the town, Monet painted Camille and Jean walking through a field of poppies. Two years later, he painted them again from below, on a windy day: Woman with a Parasol, perhaps the most famous image of his whole career.

Impression, Sunrise

In April 1874, Monet and his friends, tired of being rejected by the Salon, organized their own exhibition in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines. Monet showed a small view of the harbour of Le Havre in the morning mist, with a red sun and a few dark boats. When the catalog editor asked for a title, he suggested Impression. A critic picked up the word to mock the whole group, and the name stuck. Impression, Sunrise is now in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. Its close cousin, Sunrise (Marine), painted in the same harbour, and the busy Port of Le Havre show the same fascination with the first light on the water.

The view from Nadar's windows also gave him the bustling Boulevard des Capucines, with its crowd painted in single dark strokes. Monet kept one foot in Paris: in 1876 he showed La Japonaise, a large portrait of Camille in a red kimono, and in early 1877 he obtained permission to work inside the Gare Saint-Lazare, where he painted a dozen views of locomotives and steam, including the arrival of the Normandy train. On June 30, 1878, he found a balcony on the Rue Montorgueil and painted the street drowning in flags.

Vétheuil: Grief and Ice (1878–1881)

By then, money had run out again. Monet's main collector, the department store owner Ernest Hoschedé, had gone bankrupt. In 1878 the two families, the Monets and the Hoschedés with their six children, moved together into a rented house at Vétheuil, a village on a bend of the Seine.

Camille had been ill since the birth of their second son, Michel, in March 1878. She died on September 5, 1879, at the age of thirty-two. Monet later admitted that he caught himself studying the colours on her face at her deathbed. That winter was one of the coldest of the century. The Seine froze, and when the ice broke up in January 1880, Monet painted it again and again. Compare the silent Hoarfrost with the red winter sun over Lavacourt.

Then came spring. The plum trees blossomed, the willows turned green, the poppies came back, and the house had a garden that ran down to the river, full of flowers and giant sunflowers. Still lifes such as Apples and Grapes and a bouquet of sunflowers sold more easily than landscapes and helped feed the household. Alice Hoschedé stayed with Monet and the children, while Ernest spent more and more time in Paris.

The Manneporte near Étretat by Claude Monet: a huge rock arch rising from the sea

The Manneporte near Étretat (1886), the largest of the three rock arches.

The Coast: Cliffs, Storms and the Mediterranean (1881–1889)

After a short, unhappy stay at Poissy, where he painted the Sunday fishermen, Monet returned to the coast that had formed him. In 1882 he spent months at Pourville, near Dieppe, painting the cliffs at every hour: the cliff walk with its red parasol, the customs officer's cabin, the fishing nets, shadows on the sea, a rough sea and a sunset over the open water.

At Étretat, with its three famous rock arches, he went further still. In 1883 he painted a storm from the beach, and in the autumn of 1885 a wave swept him off his feet, easel and all. From that stay come the Manneporte, the Falaise d'Aval seen from above and the beach at the foot of the Falaise d'Amont.

In between, he discovered the south. In 1884 he spent three months at Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, struggling with a light so bright he said he would need a palette of diamonds and jewels: palm trees, olive groves, white villas and the snowy Alps. In 1886 he went to Belle-Île, off Brittany, and painted the dark, violent sea of Port-Domois and Port-Goulphar. In 1888 it was Antibes, in pinks and turquoise, and in 1889 the wild gorges of the Creuse, in rapids and deep red valleys.

Giverny: One Field, a Thousand Lights (1883–1898)

In April 1883, Monet noticed a village from the window of a train: Giverny, where the river Epte flows into the Seine. He rented a long pink house with a large orchard, moved in with Alice and the eight children, and never left. In 1890 he was able to buy the house, and in 1892, after Ernest Hoschedé's death, he married Alice.

Around Giverny he painted the countryside in every season: spring with the village church, a pear tree in blossom, frost on the riverbank, poppies in a hollow and the boating girls of the family in a rowing boat. His stepdaughter Suzanne posed among the trees in 1887.

The series

Then, in the autumn of 1890, he did something new. He set up several canvases in front of the grainstacks in the field next to his house and painted the same motif at different hours, switching canvases as the light changed. Fifteen of these grainstacks were shown together in Paris in May 1891 and sold almost at once. Monet had found his method. The following year it was the poplars on the Epte, which he paid to save from the timber merchant until he had finished, then the façade of Rouen Cathedral, painted more than thirty times from a window across the square.

These series are best seen side by side. Put a grainstack in the mist next to the same stacks on a snowy morning, or the cathedral in blue morning light next to the same stone in full sun, and you understand what he meant: the subject hardly matters, what matters is the air between you and it. In 1895 he took the method to Norway, to the snowy village of Sandvika, and in 1896 and 1897 he rowed out at dawn to paint his Mornings on the Seine.

The Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog by Claude Monet: Westminster as a dark silhouette in the London fog

The Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog (1903–1904), painted from St Thomas' Hospital.

London: Painting the Fog (1899–1904)

Monet went back to London three times, in the autumns and winters of 1899, 1900 and 1901. He stayed at the Savoy Hotel, overlooking the Thames, and painted Waterloo Bridge downstream and Charing Cross Bridge upstream. In the afternoons he moved to a terrace at St Thomas' Hospital to paint the Houses of Parliament against the setting sun.

He loved London only in winter, for its fog, which the smoke of thousands of chimneys turned yellow, pink or violet. Without the fog, he wrote, London would not be beautiful. He worked on nearly a hundred canvases at once, finished them at Giverny and showed thirty-seven of them in Paris in 1904. Some are almost abstract, like Charing Cross Bridge in a golden haze; others, like the Parliament in the fog or Waterloo Bridge at sunset, show the working city behind the colour.

The Water Garden (1893–1926)

In 1893 Monet bought a plot of land across the road from his house, diverted a small stream and dug a pond. The neighbors worried that his exotic plants would poison the water. He planted water lilies, irises and weeping willows, and built a wooden footbridge inspired by the Japanese prints that covered the walls of his house.

At first the garden was simply a pleasure. Then it became a subject. In 1899 he painted the footbridge over the pond a dozen times, then again, warmer and denser, in 1900. Little by little, the bridge and the banks disappeared, and only the surface of the water remained, as in the blue Water Lilies of 1906 or the tall golden canvases of 1907. When forty-eight of these views were shown in Paris in 1909, critics spoke of a new kind of painting.

There were a few journeys still. In the autumn of 1908, Alice convinced him to come to Venice, where he painted the Palazzo Dario, the Palazzo da Mula and the Doge's Palace floating in a pink haze. But the years that followed were hard. Alice died in 1911, his son Jean in 1914, and his sight began to cloud with cataracts.

Water Lilies by Claude Monet, 1916–1919: lily pads and willow reflections on a dark pond

Water Lilies (1916–1919), one of the large canvases of the war years.

The Grandes Décorations

During the First World War, encouraged by his old friend Georges Clemenceau, Monet built a huge studio at Giverny and began painting the pond on panels several meters long. The colours of those years became stranger and more violent as his eyesight failed: the bridge buried in foliage, the path through the irises in yellow and gold, weeping willows that many see as an image of mourning for the war dead, and wisteria hanging over deep blue water.

On November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice, Monet offered two of his panels to the French state as a monument to peace. The gift grew into a whole cycle. After a cataract operation in 1923, he could see blues again, and he kept retouching the panels almost until his death at Giverny on December 5, 1926, at the age of eighty-six. A few months later, his great Water Lilies were installed in two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where they still surround visitors today.

Bringing Monet Home

Monet's paintings are easy to live with, because they were made to be looked at for a long time. A few ideas if you are choosing one:

For a bedroom or a bathroom, the cool blues and greens of the water garden work wonders: Water Lilies with pink reflections, the Japanese footbridge and its pool or a misty Morning on the Seine.
For a living room, choose movement and colour: the cliff walk at Pourville, Poppies or the Garden at Sainte-Adresse.
For a kitchen or a dining room, his still lifes are a natural fit: a basket of apples, The Tea Set or Jerusalem artichoke flowers.
For an office or a hallway, the city and the railways bring structure: the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Boulevard des Capucines or the Parliament against a red sun.
To make a series of your own, hang two or three versions of the same subject side by side, as Monet did in his exhibitions: two grainstacks, two cathedrals or three London views at different hours.

Natural oak frames suit his gardens and fields, while black metal sharpens the fogs and night effects. If you love the period, the colours of our Van Gogh prints and posters make a natural companion.

Every Monet Poster in Our Collection

Here is every painting we reproduce, grouped by the places and periods described above.

Normandy and the Early Years (1864–1870)

Holland (1871 and 1874)

Argenteuil and Paris (1871–1878)

Vétheuil and Poissy (1878–1882)

The Coast and the Journeys South (1881–1889)

Giverny and the Series (1884–1898)

London and Vétheuil Revisited (1899–1904)

The Water Garden and Venice (1897–1926)

Looking at the Light

Monet once said that he wished he had been born blind and then suddenly gained his sight, so that he could paint without knowing what the objects in front of him were. That is the best advice for looking at his work: forget the cathedral, the haystack or the bridge, and look at the colour of the air.

To go further, the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris hold his late masterpieces, and his house and gardens at Giverny are open to visitors from spring to autumn. And when you are back home, you will find all our prints of his work in our Claude Monet collection.

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Claude Monet: A Life Chasing Light, From Le Havre to the Water Lilies

Le Havre: Caricatures and a Lesson in Sky (1840–1862)

Honfleur and Fontainebleau: A Gang of Friends (1862–1866)

Sainte-Adresse, Étretat and the Lean Years (1867–1871)