Monet was raised in Le Havre , Normandy , and became interested in the outdoors and drawing from an early age. He was very close to his mother, but she died in January when he was sixteen years old, and he was sent to live with his childless, widowed but wealthy aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. His early works include landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, but attracted little attention. From , Monet lived in Giverny , also in northern France, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project, including a water-lily pond.
Monet's ambition to document the French countryside led to a method of painting the same scene many times so as to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.
Among the best-known examples are his series of haystacks β , paintings of Rouen Cathedral β , and the paintings of water lilies in his garden in Giverny, which occupied him for the last 20 years of his life. Frequently exhibited and successful during his lifetime, Monet's fame and popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century when he became one of the world's most famous painters and a source of inspiration for a burgeoning group of artists.
Claude Monet was born on 14 November on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte , in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. His father, a wholesale merchant , wanted him to go into the family's ship-chandling and grocery business, [ 7 ] [ 8 ] but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer, and supported Monet's desire for a career in art. On 1 April , he entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts.
In his then-mistress, Camille Doncieux βwhom he had met two years earlier as a model for his paintingsβgave birth to their first child, Jean. Earlier in the year Monet had been forced to move to his aunt's house in Sainte-Adresse. This painting in particular shows the first signs of Monets' later famous impressionistic work. Several of his paintings had been purchased by Gaudibert, who commissioned a painting of his wife, alongside other projects; the Gaudiberts were for two years "the most supportive of Monet's hometown patrons ".
