On November 14, art lovers around the world celebrate the birthday of Claude Monet (1840–1926), the French painter whose name became synonymous with Impressionism.
On November 14, art lovers around the world celebrate the birthday of Claude Monet (1840–1926), the French painter whose name became synonymous with Impressionism.
November 14, 2025
On November 14, art lovers around the world celebrate the birthday of Claude Monet (1840–1926), the French painter whose name became synonymous with Impressionism.
Monet’s career began with rebellion. Rejecting the rigid conventions of academic painting, he took his easel outdoors (en plein air) to capture nature directly under changing skies. His 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise gave the movement its very name, and initially, its ridicule.
Critics mocked its hazy brushwork and unfinished look, yet that “impression” would soon redefine how art interpreted reality.
Works such as Woman with a Parasol (1875), Rouen Cathedral Series (1892–1894), and Houses of Parliament, London (1900–1901) demonstrate his obsession with light’s mutability, each canvas offering a different emotional temperature of the same scene.
In 1883, Monet settled in the village of Giverny, where he created his most enduring subject — his own garden. An avid horticulturist, Monet saw gardening as an extension of painting. He even diverted a local river to design his iconic water garden, complete with a Japanese bridge.
These man-made ponds and lilies became the focus of his Water Lilies series, more than 250 canvases that now grace museums worldwide.
Behind the beauty, Monet’s life was marked by hardship. He endured years of poverty, sometimes burning his own canvases to keep warm. Later, as cataracts clouded his vision, his world became blurred and suffused with gold and violet hues. Yet instead of despair, Monet found new beauty in this distortion, his later Water Lilies paintings verge on abstraction, foreshadowing modern art’s boldest experiments.
