Childhood in Le Havre. 1856-57: Draws caricatures. 1858: Meets Boudin. 1859: Enters Academie Suisse; meets Pissarro; Troyon advises study with Thomas Couture. 1860-1861: Military service in Algiers. 1862: Works in Le Havre with Boudin and Jongkind; enters Gleyre's studio. 1863: T0' Fontainebleau; observes Delacroix at work; leaves Gleyre and paints with Bazille, Renoir, and Sisley in Chailly. 1864: Meets Courbet; paints with Bazille, Boudin, and Jongkind in Honfleur; tries unsuccessfully to sell to Alfred Bruyas, Courbet's most important patron. 1865: Stays with Bazille in Paris; paints Dejeuner sur I'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) in Fontainebleau; works with Courbet at Trouville; meets Whistler. 1866: Lady in Green successful at Salon; meets Manet; lives in Ville d'Avray; travels to Sainte-Adresse and Le Havre. 1867: Women in the Garden rejected by Salon but purchased by Bazille; visits family in Sainte Adresse; son born to Camille Doucieux; sees Sisley in Honfleur; shares Bazille's studio with Renoir. 1868: Accepted at Salon with help of Daubigny; returns to Etretat with Renoir and Bazille; shows in Le Havre and attracts important patron (Gaudibert). 1869: With Renoir at Bougival; again in Etretat and Le Havre; creditors seize paintings; encouraged by Manet to join Cafe Guerbois circle. 1870-71: Marries mother of his child; during Franco-Prussian War, goes to London with Pissarro and meets Durand-Ruel who eventually becomes his dealer; to Holland and Argenteuil. 1872: With Boudin, visits Courbet (in prison); returns to Le Havre and Holland; begins to paint with Renoir at Argenteuil. 1873: Like Daubigny, builds a studio boat and uses it for Seine paintings; meets Gustave Caillebotte. 1874: First group exhibition of "Impressionists," term popularized by Le Charivari critic who criticizes Impression - Sunrise; Manet and Renoir join him in Argenteuil. Included in later Impressionist exhibitions: 1876, 1877, 1879, and 1882.

Impressionist Painting, so-called after 1874, has over the last century been increasingly identified with the work of Claude Monet. And while not everything of accomplishment within the Impressionist orbit was of Monet's making, he certainly provided leadership in matters of landscape imaging for a group 0'f exceptional artists, including Bazille, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Following a few rapidly assimilated leads from his first mentor, Boudin, in the years around 1860', Monet was well into his early career as a landscape and seascape painter when Bazille, Renoir, and Sisley began to' follow his example. Only Pissarro had managed to evolve something like an aesthetic life of his own in the years before he began to consider Monet's directions in the later 1860's and from the perspective of painting practice, Pissarro had nearly a decade's head start!

Exactly how and why Monet managed the kind of imaging he did during the decade of the 1860's remains a puzzle. He had almost no formal training, a minimum apprenticeship of sorts with Boudin, and he modeled his work on that of others only in highly selective ways. Between 1858 and 1862 he devoured the work 0'f the generation 0'f 1830' as well as that 0'f Daubigny, Jongkind, and Courbet-just by looking at it, one suspects. He made no' real copies; he rather chose t0' develop his eye, assuming his hands would follow as directed. While expressing admiration for the greatest of his predecessors from the beginning and regularly throughout his career, Monet seems from the first to have been determined to produce consistently original work. The standards for the forceful kind of creativity he sought appeared early in the 1860's in the scandal-provoking figure paintings of Edouard Manet: Dejeuner sur I'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and Olympia (both Paris, Musée d'Orsay). They appeared as well (for Monet probably via second-hand experience) in the music of Richard Wagner, which held center stage in the circles of advanced culture in Paris, beginning in 1859 and continuing up to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. What Manet's painting and Wagner's symphonic writing had in common was a boldness and frankness of effect. Although working in different media, both artists dealt with their audience in new ways - ways that were aggressive, provoking, and loud visually as well as audibly. Both seem to have enjoyed, at least to a point, producing various degrees of scandal with aesthetic surprise, and both, in ways appropriate to his particular medium, used color as the chief device of surprise. (This is elaborated elsewhere in this catalogue.) Coloristic surprise was therefore the common currency of the most ambitious forms of contemporary artistic practice that Monet knew in the early 1860's Additionally he realized that to be seen or heard as an original artist he would have to deal in that currency as well as absorb and hopefully benefit from the shock waves he might produce. But the prospect of all this excited him, and it is doubtful whether he could ever have become the artist he did, had he not entered the aesthetic scene at such a frenzied moment.

Monet had already developed a strong taste for color in his early stints of work with Boudin, and during his brief period of military service in Algeria (part of 186o and 1861), he literally fell in love with color of the purest sort, as he found himself surrounded by it in the cloudless world of Arab North Africa. Back in France, the creative questions ultimately became what to make of this love and how to express it, particularly in landscape images. Mid-century landscape examples, even the lightest of Daubigny's paintings of c. 186o, provided relatively few hints regarding a strictly color-based mode of landscape imaging. Corot was probably the nearest thing to a fully color-reliant maker of landscapes that Monet could find, but Corot's color was Corot's color, which is to say tonal and subdued and never given to strong contrasts of hue or value.

Fortunately, Manet had begun to produce seascapes on a more or less routine basis starting in 1864, and while cultivating in them anything but familiar natural effects, he managed through the rhetorically movemented character of his paint structure and the crispness of his value contrasts to evoke strong and immediate sensations. Although his images might look willfully unnatural in many respects, they had enormous optical vitality; that vitality became a talisman for Monet. From 1864 onward, he worked to emulate not so much the appearance of Manet's work, but its energy. Monet derived additional support in matters of appearance from Japanese woodblock prints. What they provided uniquely was an imaging of landscape (among other things) technically restricted to significant shaping of color. With inspirational hints gleaned from Manet's work and Japanese prints, Monet after 1865 would proceed to become his own original.

The primary concern of Monet's landscape imaging would be to make pure color relationships stand for broadly defined nature-based sensations. The process would never be one of simply matching painted color to natural color as it had largely been in Constable and late Daubigny. Instead, color relationships in Monet's works combine in an ultimately endless variety of ways the experience of viewing nature and painting directly from it in the out of-doors with the differentials of feeling induced by the simultaneous activity of looking and painting. Simplifications of various descriptive sorts and exaggerations of color intensity and color contrast (until they are made to match seeing and feeling) - in other words, all manner of schematic artifice - can be considered up to the outer limits of something like representational plausibility. A loose and highly variable paint structure, alternating regular and irregular brush marks, serves Monet in two ways: first, to theatricalize representational plausibility through technical assertions of spontaneous response to an "actual" moment of nature (here, he invokes the predictable viewer tolerance for the exclusions and inclusions of the traditional sketch); and second, to allow the artist the freedom to tighten or loosen color passages at will. A virtually absolute freedom of stress is what Monet wants and what he miraculously manages almost from the first. His stresses come from himself. They come from within the maker and are deposited in the forms of the painting.

Nature, or more concisely, the spectator's understanding of it, would never be the same after Monet had finished imaging it. His willful persistence in making nature behave in accordance with his color feelings caught a science gullible public unaware. That public came to believe and continues to believe in Monet the researcher, rather than in Monet the magician and aesthetic conjurer. Smartly, Monet never said anything to contradict his public's belief, and he managed by keeping quiet to make the world willingly believe that nature looks like an Impressionist painting. There were a few disbelievers at first, but their complaints soon faded against the collective desire of spectators to be lusciously deceived by works that were truthful only in the radical beauty of their original feeling which was authentic in a creative sense rather than a descriptive one.

It is absolutely remarkable how much of Monet's originality is already functioning by the late 1860"s with strong hints appearing even earlier. In Haystacks near Chailly at Sunrise and The Pointe de la Heve at Low Tide, one sees the extremes of Monet's early imaging modes - the former broad and schematic in both color and surface construction, the latter composed of an extraordinarily wide range of brush marks which trace the complex of (distant) coastline, beach, and water both as contrasting zones of color and of color elaborated by natural texture. Two years later in c. 1867, the Street in Sainte Adresse combines the extremes of the schematic and the intricate. A broadly distributed complementary color contrast of various blues and autumnally yellowed greens works along with high value grays in the middle of the image to strike a very bright and resonant chord that seems guided by carefully constructed relationships of shape that proceed differently to the left and right of the central church steeple. Without looking highly contrived, the image delivers its feeling through a judicious balance of believable natural incident and arbitrary decorative control of color and shape.

The paint structure remains comparatively neat and finished in a work, which was likely intended for submission to the Salon.

All traces of neatness or any other manner of concession to a conservative viewing public vanish in the aggressive vibrancy of both color and paint structure in the 1869 Seine at Bougival. Paint marks and what they represent compete for the viewer's attention. Solid shapes, shadows, water, and foliage blur representationally (in spite of the existence of a "welcoming" road on the right side). Pictorial space is largely siphoned out in order that the tapestry-like intensity and the variety of hue are displayed at every point. Not one but several color chords are struck simultaneously.

Over the next five decades, Monet would learn a great deal technically both about color and supporting painting construction, but he would never lose the taste for aggressively spectator challenging freshness that he developed even before 1870. His art would never be any more or less original, and the basic character of the originality would remain constant. Once he had accomplished his great forward mutation of landscape imaging, all that was left for him was to cultivate ingeniously what was in essence a post-Realist terrain that he had in fact invented and over which he remained absolute master.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton