Claude Monet
Artist
Biography
Oscar-Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a French painter and a founder of Impressionism, seen as a key precursor of modernism, especially in his efforts to paint nature as he perceived it. Throughout his long career he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism’s approach, particularly in plein-air landscape painting; the movement’s name derives from his painting Impression, Sunrise, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Raised in Le Havre, he studied at the Académie Suisse and under Charles Gleyre, where Auguste Renoir was a fellow student, and was encouraged early on by Eugène Boudin.