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Claude Monet (Born Paris, 14 November 1840; died Giverny, 5 December 1926). French Impressionist painter. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures—Impression: Sunrise (1872, Mus. Marmottan, Paris)—gave the group its name. His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his enthusiasm for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Académie Suisse and formed a friendship with Pissarro. After two years' military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed ‘the definitive education of my eye’. Then, in 1862, he entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group.

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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