1840-1926
Painter

Early Life and Career. Claude Monet was born in Paris, the eldest son of a grocer. When Claude was five, the family moved to Le Havre, a port city on the English Channel, where he spent his childhood. The coastline and tempestuous skies of Normandy appear frequently in his later paintings, suggesting that the environment had a formative influence on him. As a teenager he was an accomplished caricaturist. In 1858 a meeting with the painter Eugene Boudin (1824-1898) directed Monet's artistic efforts toward landscape painting in the out-of-doors. As Monet recalled, "All of a sudden, it was like a veil torn from my eyes and I understood at last, I realized what painting could be; thanks to the example of this painter. . . . My own destiny as a painter opened up before me." Within a year he was in Paris studying at the Academie Suisse...