For many years, what I read about Monet seemed to indicate an artist with a prodigious work ethic, who went about the labor of his profession without the hindrance of temperament. His unwavering focus was almost intimidating. Finally, I read a book which described his behavior on the bad weather days - when he couldn't go out to paint the landscape. According to this book, at such times Monet was so inconsolable that he wouldn't get out of bed. What a relief to find him human!
He had to have the best eyesight in human history. What Cezanne was to cerebral painting, Monet was to visual painting. Cezanne supposedly said of him, "Monet is just an eye - but God, what an eye!" His placement of forms, large and miniscule, was so precise that everything in the image was perfectly formed and placed, just like it is when we see it in nature. But anyone who has ever painted, particularly landscapes, knows that to achieve the same coherence on a blank canvas is not nearly as easy as Monet makes it look. The forms and colors are constantly misbehaving, in the wrong places, with the wrong color.
This facility with paint has led some to dismiss Monet's work, along with Impressionism, as merely visual, naturalistic, and committing the ultimate sin - formlessness. But to those who prize color over form, Monet's work is colossal in its nature - just as colossal in its own way as Cezanne. Though he began with Impressionism's fleeting moment in time, Monet's work over time became less interested in external reality, and more in the abstract qualities of paint on canvas. This development peaked with his late water lilies series of large paintings, in which color, light and paint were the subjects, anticipating mid-20th century painterly abstraction.
Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840, but grew up in Le Havre, France. As a young man, he drew caricatures of his teachers, which revealed a draftsman's ability with portraiture. When he met the landscape painter Boudin, while Boudin was working en plein air (outside, rather than in his studio), he listened to Boudin's ideas on the value of working directly from nature. Painting outdoors didn't really become common until paint became available in metal tubes in the 1840's. Still, artists only did oil sketches outdoors, in preparation for their more ambitious work in their studio. Of the 19th century Barbizon school of French landscape painters, only Daubigny had completed his paintings outside. Boudin stressed that a painter should retain his first impression of a scene; and that working from life quickly and with great concentration added a power to the work which was lost in the studio. Boudin did many small studies, often of beach scenes, from life, which had a freshness and spontaneity very unusual for this time period. His idea raised the level of the "sketch" to a valid work in its own right. Monet was much influenced by these ideas, and soon began painting landscapes from life himself. When he announced that he wanted to study art, his business merchant father was not enthusiastic, but reluctantly gave his permission. So Monet went to Paris to study in the studio of the academic painter Gleyre.
In Gleyre's studio he met Renoir and other young students. They sometimes were resistant to the master's relatively academic methods, which included working from plaster casts of antique Roman statues in the studio. This academic training caused many 19th century paintings to be so carefully modeled and blended that the very life was sucked out of them, and the colors brown and dull, the colors of the studio, not the blue sky and green grass, red flowers of the world outside. Classicism and Romanticism had previously dueled in the 19th century official French art academy, the Ecole des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts). Classicism was represented by painters such as Ingres, who considered line and drawing to be the important elements of painting. Delacroix represented the Romantic school of painting, more concerned with color and brushwork. Then Courbet, with his ideas of Realism, challenged both Classicism and Romanticism, with his idea that painting should only represent the real world, with real figures, landscapes and objects of the present-day world - not the idealized world of history, mythology and classical subjects of Classicism and Romanticism. Monet was influenced by Courbet's realism, however of the two other approaches, he was definitely closer to that of Delacroix. He had experienced his military service in Algeria shortly before his student experience of 1862-63, and was most affected, as was Delacroix, by the intense light and color of Africa.
At this time, Monet also admired the Dutch landscape painter Jongkind, the American painter Whistler, and French painters Corot and Edouard Manet. Edouard Manet at this time (1860's) was making a big splash in the Parisian art world, and ruffling many academic feathers with his new way of painting. Though he was a reluctant revolutionary, Manet's work, influenced by the painting of Velazquez, dared to paint without the tradition of modeling forms with shading, and blending colors smoothly together. Not only that, it didn't deal with images from history, mythology, classical Greece and Rome, which were currently considered to be the acme of painting. He painted scenes of modern life, with men and women dressed in mid-19th century Parisian fashion; though some of these women were nude, and seemed to be frankly courtesans.