Art + cross stitch

Claude Monet was, frankly, impossible: stubborn, obsessive, prone to dramatic despair and utterly convinced that whatever he was painting was a disaster. He destroyed many of his own paintings. In 1908 he reportedly slashed a batch of water lily canvases rather than show work he disliked, and ignored his dealer and friends when they begged him to stop.

Yet the paintings that survived rank among the most loved in human history. Go figure.

A Normandy Boy With Big Ideas

Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but the family moved to Le Havre in Normandy when he was about five, and that is where the story starts. The coast, cliffs and light on the water entered his bones early and never left. His life’s work, if you squint, is one long love letter to light on a wet surface.

His father wanted him in the family grocery business. His mother died when he was sixteen. His aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, an amateur painter, took him under her wing, which was either the best or worst thing ever to happen to the Monet grocery business.

As a teenager Claude sold caricatures in Le Havre, charming, slightly wicked likenesses popular enough to earn real money. He later claimed to be embarrassed by this phase. We don’t believe him.

Boudin and the Great Outdoors

The man who set him on his path was Eugène Boudin, a local landscape painter who persuaded the teenage Monet to paint en plein air, outdoors rather than in a cosy studio. Monet resisted and complained, then painted outside and basically never stopped.

“If I became a painter,” Monet said later, “I owe it to Eugène Boudin.” High praise from a man famously stingy with it.

He moved to Paris and befriended Renoir, Sisley and Bazille, young painters who would be sneered at by the art establishment and then, ironically, become it. He was poor and often rejected by the official Paris Salon, and carried on regardless.

The Exhibition That Named a Movement

In 1874 Monet and his friends, fed up with the Salon’s gatekeeping, held their own independent exhibition. Monet showed Impression, Sunrise: a hazy, sketchy view of Le Havre’s port at dawn, all fog, orange light and a barely visible boat.

Critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review, using the title to coin “Impressionist” as an insult. Impression! Not even a finished painting! The artists replied, essentially, yes, exactly, thank you. That is how Impressionism got its name, from a man trying to be rude.

The Women He Loved

Monet’s first great love was Camille Doncieux, his model, companion and mother of his two sons. They lived together for years before marrying in 1870, partly because his family disapproved and partly because he was permanently broke.

He painted her constantly. Woman in a Green Dress (1866) made him briefly famous, while Women in the Garden was rejected by the Salon. She appears walking through poppy fields, in snow and, most famously, in Woman with a Parasol (1875), with their son Jean.

When Camille died in 1879, aged only 32 after a long illness, Monet was devastated. Then, in a moment he later confessed with something like horror, he found himself studying the colours of her face, and painted her on her deathbed.

“I caught myself watching her tragic forehead,” he told his friend Georges Clemenceau, “almost automatically searching for the sequence of coloured gradations that death imposed on her motionless face.”

He was horrified by himself, but kept the painting.

Giverny and an Obsession

In 1883 Monet moved to the Normandy village of Giverny, renting a house and buying it in 1890. With him came Alice Hoschedé, wife of a bankrupt former patron, who ran his household and raised their eight combined children. They married in 1892, after her husband’s death. It was complicated, and they made it work.

Then Monet built a garden, not just any garden but the garden. He hired a team of gardeners, covered his walls with Japanese woodblock prints for inspiration, diverted a stream to make a water garden, built the Japanese bridge, planted weeping willows and grew water lilies, nymphéas, in extraordinary variety.

And he painted it for nearly thirty years: the pond in morning and afternoon light, autumn and summer, from different heights and distances. He returned to the same views obsessively, like a man chasing something always just out of frame, which it was, because light never stops moving.

His neighbours were not thrilled; they feared his exotic plants would poison the water. Monet, no diplomat, pressed on.

Cataracts and Painting in the Dark

Around 1912 Monet noticed his vision changing. Colours looked muddy and outlines blurred. He was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes, and over the next decade his sight worsened badly.

Another man might have stopped. Monet did not.

He painted from memory and instinct, relying on the labels on his paint tubes and the set order of colours on his palette. His work changed: luminous blues gave way to murkier reds, browns and yellows, the colours a cataract-clouded eye actually sees.

In 1923, aged 82, he finally agreed to surgery on one eye. It partly restored his sight, and he was dismayed by some of what he had painted in his worst years, reworking or destroying a number of canvases.

The Water Lilies, a Gift to France

By 1914 his son Jean had died, Alice died in 1911, and the First World War was breaking out across France. Monet was old, half-blind, grieving and lonely, and, typically, starting his most ambitious project yet.

He began a series of enormous water lily paintings, Les Nymphéas, and had a huge new studio built at Giverny to hold the canvases. He worked on them for over a decade.

The day after the Armistice in November 1918, he offered two panels to France as a peace gesture. His old friend Georges Clemenceau, then Prime Minister, urged something bigger. Monet agreed, argued, threatened to withdraw, changed his mind and finally committed to a full donation.

The paintings now fill two oval rooms in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie, as Monet intended, a continuous panorama of water and light that surrounds you. You don’t look at these paintings; you stand inside them.

He died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged 86. At his funeral Clemenceau is said to have pulled away the black cloth over the coffin and replaced it with a flowered one: “No black for Monet!”

More About Monet

• Monet took food very seriously. The yellow dining room at Giverny was famous for its meals, and his household recipe notebooks survive.
• He loved irises as well as water lilies and planted them in abundance. You can stitch his Irises.
• He ordered plants obsessively, including rare varieties from Japan and specialist nurseries.
• While painting his Poplars series along the river Epte, he learned the trees were about to be sold and felled, so he paid the timber merchant to leave them standing until he finished.

Why It Still Matters

Monet spent his life chasing something he could never pin down: the exact quality of light at one moment on one surface, painted so that the viewer feels the air as much as sees it. He failed, again and again, at that specific goal, and in thousands of attempts to catch something fleeting he made paintings that stop museum visitors in their tracks, not quite sure why they feel what they feel.

That is the trick. You don’t paint what a lily pond looks like; you paint what it feels like to be there on a still morning, when the water is so calm it could be the sky. It took him about sixty years and many destroyed canvases, but he got there.

Want more? Meet another painter who turned light and colour into emotion in The Starry Night, a painter who returned to one sunlit scene in Raymond Wintz’s Blue and Green Doors, or read Why Fine Art Is Becoming Cross Stitch’s Most Beautiful Trend.