Frammenti di luce e di colore Una finestra sull'Impressionismo | Page 51

1. Claude
Monet
Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris.
In 1945, his family moved to Le Havre,
the place where Monet passed all his
teenage years. When he was fifteen, he
became famous for drawing and selling
charcoal caricatures of famous people
in his city, afterwards, he knew Eugène
Boudin, who made him known landsca-
pe painting. Therefore, he moved again
to Paris in 1859, living with the profit of
his caricatures. He studied at the Suisse
Academy, where he knew Pissarro and
Courbet. In 1861, he went to Algeria for
military service. In 1862 he came back to
France, in Chailly. He made friends with
Renoir, Sisley and Bazille. In this period
Monet painted “Women in the garden”
and “Camille (The Woman in a Green
Dress)”. Afterwards, he focused on the
atmospheric effects of light and colour,
thanks to the influence of William Tur-
ner’s chromatic experiments, an Engli-
sh Romanticist landscape painter whom
Monet saw in 1870 in London, where
he took refuge after the breakout of the
Franco-Prussian War. The same year, just
before the outbreak of the War, he had
married Camille Doncieux. From 1871
to 1878, he lived in Argenteuil, where
he purchased a small boat equipped to
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