50 Fun Facts About Claude Monet

Monet grew up on the Normandy coast, but in which city was he born in 1840?

Paris. The family left when he was five for the Normandy coast, where the beaches and fast-changing weather of his childhood shaped the way he would later paint light.

What did Monet's father want him to go into instead of art?

The family grocery business, which also supplied ships in port. His mother, a trained singer, took his side over art, but she died in 1857.

How did the teenage Monet first earn money from art?

Drawing caricatures of acquaintances. He started at 15, and at up to 20 francs a sheet they sold well enough to give him real savings by the time he left home to study art.

Which Normandy seascape painter persuaded the teenage Monet to try painting outdoors?

Eugène Boudin. Monet's life as a painter began with their outings, and in 1874 the older man hung his own work beside his former pupil's at the first Impressionist exhibition.

Who are the woman and boy in Monet's Woman with a Parasol?

His wife and son: Camille and seven-year-old Jean, caught from below on a windy summer walk. About a decade later he painted the pose twice more, with his stepdaughter Suzanne holding the parasol.

Monet paid to keep which riverside trees standing after their village put them up for auction mid-series?

Poplars. The row along the Epte came up for auction in 1891 before he had finished, so he paid out of his own pocket to keep it standing; a timber merchant took the trees once the series was done.

Where did the young Monet do his army service in 1861-62, coming home excited by its colours?

Algeria. By most accounts he caught typhoid there and was sent home to recover, and his family then bought him out of the rest of his service.

Which future Impressionist did Monet meet as a fellow student in Charles Gleyre's studio in 1862?

Auguste Renoir. The two, with Bazille and Sisley, soon fell out with Gleyre's academic teaching and went off together to paint in the open air in the forest of Fontainebleau.

Which Monet canvas, so tall he lowered it into a trench to paint the top, did the 1867 Salon refuse?

Women in the Garden. His friend Frédéric Bazille bought it in monthly instalments to keep him afloat, and in 1921 the French state acquired the painting its Salon jury had turned away.

Camille Doncieux, mother of Monet's son Jean, first entered his life in what role?

As a model for his paintings. She posed for Camille, the portrait that won him praise at the 1866 Salon, but his father disapproved of the affair and cut off his money.

Why did Monet move to London in 1870?

To avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War. His close friend Frédéric Bazille made the opposite choice, enlisted that August and was killed in action in November.

Which dealer, met in London in 1870-71, became Monet's first and primary art dealer?

Paul Durand-Ruel. Monet complained in 1886 that the dealer cared only about the United States, yet it was those American sales that finally made the painter financially secure.

In the 1870s, Monet fitted out a small riverboat as what?

A floating studio. It let him set up his easel on the water itself and paint the river and its reflections from viewpoints no bank could give him.

What, embedded in the paint of Monet's The Beach at Trouville, shows he painted it on the spot?

Grains of sand. The sea breeze blew them into the wet paint in the summer of 1870, as Monet worked on the beach in the weeks after his wedding.

Monet and his friends held their breakaway 1874 exhibition in the former studio of which photographer?

Félix Nadar. Monet had painted the street below from those very rooms, and his Boulevard des Capucines hung in the show; the group called itself the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers.

When a critic first called Monet's circle 'Impressionists' in 1874, how did he mean it?

As an insult. Louis Leroy took the word from the title of Monet's Impression, Sunrise to sneer that the pictures were unfinished, and the name stuck to the whole movement.

Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of which town?

Le Havre. Asked for a catalogue title, Monet said the hazy harbour scene could hardly pass for a view of the town, so he told them to put 'Impression'.

Monet handed his giant Luncheon on the Grass to a landlord over unpaid rent; what ruined it in storage?

Damp. When he bought the canvas back years later parts of it had rotted, so he cut the damage away and kept the pieces that survive, two of them now in the Musée d'Orsay.

Which place did Monet paint a dozen times in early 1877, showing several views at the third Impressionist exhibition?

Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the terminus for trains to Normandy that he had known since childhood, and he got permission to set up inside and paint its smoke and steam.

What did Monet paint in the hours after his first wife, Camille, died in 1879?

Her face on her deathbed. He confessed years later that even in his grief he had caught himself noting the changing colours of her skin by sheer reflex.

Monet's bankrupt patron Ernest Hoschedé moved his family in with the Monets; whom did Monet later marry?

Hoschedé's widow. Alice married Monet in 1892, a year after the ruined department-store magnate died, and her daughter Blanche went on to marry Monet's son Jean.

When Monet rented his Giverny farmhouse in 1883, he repainted its grey shutters which colour?

Green. He painted them in his first year there, along with a dining room in two shades of yellow, and bought the house outright in 1890 once his pictures were selling.

Monet attended the 1883 funeral of which fellow painter, days after moving to Giverny?

Édouard Manet. Six years later Monet repaid the friendship by raising a public subscription to buy Manet's Olympia from his widow and present it to the French state.

Monet's 1884 trip to paint the palms and gardens of Bordighera took him to which country?

Italy. He planned three weeks in the seaside town and stayed nearly three months, writing home that its palm trees were exasperating to paint.

When Monet planned his lily pond, what did Giverny's farmers fear his exotic plants would do?

Poison the water. Monet was furious at the objection, but the prefect ruled in his favour, and the pond he then dug became the great subject of his old age.

At which event did Monet first see the newly bred coloured water lilies he later planted at Giverny?

A World's Fair display. The hybrids on show there were bred by Joseph Latour-Marliac, and when Monet dug his pond a few years later he stocked it with lilies ordered from the same grower.

Which subject did Monet paint for the first of his series to go on show, in 1891?

Haystacks. Fifteen of the canvases went on show in May 1891 and most sold within a month, and from then on he built his working life around painting in series.

Which cathedral's façade did Monet paint more than thirty times from rented rooms across the square?

Rouen Cathedral. One of his makeshift studios was the fitting room of a lingerie shop; he reworked the canvases at home for a year and then showed twenty of them in 1895.

Painting his series, why did Monet switch between several canvases over a single day?

The light kept changing. He gave each canvas to one effect of light and weather, then set it aside for the next as the day moved on.

From which London hotel did Monet paint the Thames on his stays from 1899 to 1901?

The Savoy. He chose it for its sweeping view of the river, and on three visits he painted Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge from his rooms dozens of times each.

From a terrace at St Thomas' Hospital, across the river, Monet painted a famous series of which London landmark?

The Houses of Parliament. He crossed the Thames from his hotel to paint them in the late afternoon and at sunset, and a 2006 study of the sun's position in the pictures confirmed the viewpoint.

In the autumn of 1908, a reluctant Monet was persuaded to visit and paint which city of canals and palaces?

Venice. On his only visit he wrote that it was a misfortune not to have come when he was younger and bolder, yet he began 37 canvases there.

Monet told a dealer that London would not be a beautiful city without what?

Its fog. He said it gave London its 'magnificent breadth' and wrapped its buildings in a 'mysterious cloak'; the haze he loved was largely coal smoke.

Monet offered his great Water Lilies panels to France the day after which event?

The Armistice of 1918. He first promised two panels as a monument to peace, and the gift grew into the whole cycle that he went on reworking until his death.

Roughly how many paintings did Monet make of his water garden at Giverny?

About 250. The last of them were so large, each more than two metres high, that in 1916 he had a new studio built just to paint them.

Which American painter visited Giverny and painted Monet at work at the edge of a wood?

John Singer Sargent. The society portraitist caught Monet at his easel outdoors in the 1880s, and afterwards tried Monet's open-air way of working for himself.

Which eye condition dulled Monet's sense of colour for a decade until he agreed to surgery in 1923?

Cataracts. Surgery was crude and risky then, so he refused it for years and painted on through the blur, finally letting a surgeon operate on his right eye alone.

How did Monet cope with colour as his sight failed?

By keeping a fixed palette order. He picked each colour from memory of its place, and once he was relying on that memory alone, he finally agreed to an operation.

After a 1923 operation on his right eye, which colour did Monet see far more strongly than before?

Blue. His bad eye had been filtering out blue light for years; once operated on it saw the world as too blue, so he wore tinted lenses and repainted some canvases with bluer lilies.

Which statesman and close friend urged Monet to paint his great Water Lilies cycle and give it to France?

Georges Clemenceau. France's wartime prime minister coaxed him out of mourning to begin the cycle, and later pressed him to have the eye operation he dreaded.

During World War I, Monet painted a series of what, apparently in mourning for France's war dead?

Weeping willows. He had painted ten of them by 1919, having refused to leave Giverny as the front drew near while his younger son served in the army.

In Monet's day, what ran between his flower garden at Giverny and his lily pond?

A railway line. Trains passed along the bottom of the flower garden, with a road beside the track, and visitors today reach the pond through an underground passage instead.

What did a friend do at Monet's funeral, crying 'No black for Monet!'?

Draped the coffin in flowered cloth. He pulled away the black pall that covered it first, and Monet was then buried in the village churchyard at Giverny.

Which museum has two oval rooms built to Monet's own plan for his great Water Lilies panels?

The Orangerie. Monet did not live to see it: the panels he had reworked for years were hung there in 1927, a few months after his death.

What happened to Water Lilies paintings owned by the Museum of Modern Art in 1958?

They burned in a fire. The 1958 blaze destroyed the museum's Water Lilies and sent staff hurrying other artworks out of the building.

Monet's collection of what, now displayed in his house at Giverny, had a pronounced influence on his art?

Japanese woodcut prints. He even modelled the arched footbridge over his lily pond on the bridges he had seen in them.

Who was convicted of the 1998 theft of Monet's Cliffs Near Dieppe from a gallery in Nice?

The museum's curator. He went to prison for it and the painting came back, only to be stolen again in 2007 and recovered a second time the following year.

Who left Monet's neglected house and gardens at Giverny to France's Academy of Fine Arts in 1966?

His son Michel. A car enthusiast with no children, he died in a road accident at 87, and after a long restoration the house and gardens opened to visitors in 1980.

Monet's The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil shows a steam train crossing which river?

The Seine. Argenteuil, his home for most of the 1870s, was a riverside town just outside the capital where factories met pleasure boats, and that mix of industry and leisure gave him his subjects.

A 2013 New York case over Monet's Le Bassin aux Nymphéas involved an aide to which former first lady?

Imelda Marcos. The Monet was bought during her husband's presidency, allegedly with public money, and after her former aide sold it the Philippine government went to court to get it back.