Claude Monet

Claude Monet was born in Paris and grew up in the port of Le Havre, where as a teenager he sold caricatures of local people. The painter Eugène Boudin encouraged him to paint outdoors, directly from nature. In Paris he befriended Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille, and they worked side by side, trying to capture the changing effects of light with quick, visible brushstrokes and bright color. Rejected by the official Salon, he and his friends held their own exhibition in 1874. A critic mocked his painting Impression, Sunrise, calling the whole group Impressionists, and the name stuck. In 1883 Monet settled at Giverny, west of Paris. He painted series of the same subject at different times of day: haystacks, poplars, and the front of Rouen Cathedral. He created a flower garden and a water garden with a Japanese-style bridge and water lilies, which he painted about 250 times. In his last years, despite cataracts, he painted huge water lily panels that he gave to France; they hang in the Orangerie in Paris. He died at Giverny in 1926.

Faith: Baptized Catholic; later became an atheist. Source: Wikipedia