ArtMuse67: Monet's Garden

This weekend I had the pleasure of going to the New York Botanical Garden and viewing their exhibit on the gardens French impressionist painter Claude Monet cultivated at his house in Giverny, France. I knew the basics about Monet but had no idea what an avid gardener he was. According to the exhibit at one point he was even quoted saying, "if I wasn't a painter, I'd be a botanist."

I never knew that so many of the landscape and flower paintings Monet did were of his own gardens! It was amazing and beautiful to see how inspiring he made his surroundings, it was practically like living in a painting. Here are a few of my photographs from the exhibit, fast facts about Monet, and some lesson plan ideas I found based on his art.

20 Fast Facts about Monet:

1. Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 and died December 5, 1926.
2. Claude Monet was born on the 5th floor of 45 Rue Laffitte (the name of the street) in Paris.
3. Was baptized in Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the local parish church.
4. Monet was baptized as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. It is strange that we all call him Claude.
5. Claude Monet was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. His parents were second-generation Parisians.
6. Monet wanted to become an artist, but his father wanted him to go into the family grocery business.
7. While attending Le Havre secondary school of the arts, the locals knew Monet well for his charcoal caricatures.
8. On January 28, 1857, when Monet was only sixteen, his mother died.
9. After his mother died, Monet left school and went to live with Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, his widowed childless aunt.
10. Monet painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) in 1872. It depicted a Le Havre port landscape. In 1874 it hung in the first Impressionist exhibition. When art critic Louis Leroy read the painting’s titled, he coined the term “Impressionism”. Leroy meant his assessment to be negative, but the Impressionists at the time approved of description and it stuck.
11. In June 1861, Monet joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year commitment. However, after two years later, he had contracted typhoid fever. The army agreed to release him from his service commitment at the pleas from his aunt, but only if he agreed to complete an art course at an art school.
12. In 1862, Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley while he was a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris. They discussed the effects of light with broken color and rapid brushstrokes which is the mark of Impressionism.
13. Jacques-François Ochard gave Claude Monet his first drawing lessons.
14. Eugène Boudin, an artist and Monet’s mentor, taught him to use oil paints and techniques.
The Woman in the Green Dress (La femme à la robe verte) was painted in 1866. This painting brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his first wife, Camille Doncieux.
15. At the young age of thirty-two, Monet’s wife, Camille Monet, died of tuberculosis. Even while on her deathbed, Monet took the opportunity to paint his wife.
16. In 1878, Claude Monet’s second child, Michel Monet, was born.
17. In May 1883, Monet rented a farm house located between Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. He used the barn as a painting studio. The property also had orchards and a small garden.
18. In 1890, Monet purchased the house and land outright. After becoming the owner, he created the gardens which he would spend the rest of his life painting.
19. Monet also created several series of paintings which included: Rouen Cathedral, Poplars, the Parliament, Mornings on the Seine, and the Water Lilies.
20. On December 5, 1926, Monet died at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.Monet had insisted that the occasion be simple; thus only about fifty people attended the ceremony. His home, garden and waterlily pond were bequeathed by his son Michel, his only heir, to the French Academy of Fine Arts (part of the Institut de France) in 1966.