Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise, (Impression, soleil levant).
Monet (Claude Monet) was born in Paris in 1840 but grew up in Le Havre, where his family moved when he was still a small child.
At a very early age he attracted the attention of the landscape painting artist Eugene Boudin, who took him to paint in the open air and passed on to him his fondness for the Dutch tradition of landscape painting. Monet then moved to Paris, where he enrolled in the Academie Suisse and met Camille Pissarro. The pair frequented Baudelaire, as well as Courbet and other Realist painters. Their evening discussions inspired and encouraged them to develop a style remote from the schemes of academic painting. On his return from military service in Algeria, the artist went back to Le Havre, where he started to paint from life again with Boudin and the Dutchman Johan Barthold Jongkind. In 1862 he went to live in Paris again, where he frequented the studio of the academician Charles Gleyre and made friends with Renoir and Sisley.
