Claude Monet is considered one of the most influential artists of all time. He is a founder of the French Impressionist art movement, and today his paintings sell for millions of dollars. While Monet was alive, however, his work was often criticized and he struggled financially. With over one hundred black-and-white illustrations, this book unveils a true portrait of the artist!

Claude Monet is one of the most famous painters in history, and he is considered a pioneer of the Impressionist movement. What is Impressionism, and how does Monet's work reflect its purest principles? Readers discover the answers to these and other questions about Monet's life and work as they examine the stories behind some of his most beloved paintings. Colorful examples of his work and photographs from his life fill the pages, alongside annotated quotes from art historians, other artists, and Monet himself. Detailed sidebars appeal to young artists and provide more fascinating details about Monet's life.

From a world authority on impressionism and nineteenth-century French art comes this new addition to the World of Art series on the art and life of Claude Monet. One of the most famous and admired painters of all time, Claude Monet (1840– 1926) was the architect of impressionism—a revolution that gave birth to modern art. His technique of painting outside at the seashore or in city streets was as radically new as his subject matter: the landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris. Working with unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed that his work was both natural and true, and therefore, entirely novel. In Monet, James H. Rubin, one of the world’s foremost specialists in nineteenth-century French art, traces Monet’s development, from his early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of water lilies and his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped shape Monet’s work, including the utopian thought that gave rise to his politics, his interest in Japanese prints and gardening, and his relationship with earlier French landscape painters and contemporaries such as E´douard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Featuring more than 150 color illustrations of his key works, Rubin establishes Monet as the inspiration for generations of avant-garde artists and a true patriarch of modern art.

Spanning the artist's entire career, this book explores Claude Monet's enduring relationship with nature and the landscapes he returned to again and again. Capturing fleeting natural impressions played a central role in the art of Claude Monet. He deeply engaged with the landscape and light of different places, from the metropolis of Paris to the Seine villages of Argenteuil and Giverny. This lavishly illustrated volume explores the development of Monet's art from the 1850s to the 1920s, focusing on the places, both at home and on his frequent travels, from which he drew inspiration for his painting. In addition, the book traces the critical shift in Monet's art that occurred when he began to focus on series of the same subjects such as haystacks, poplars, and the water lilies and pond at his meticulously designed garden in Giverny. Insightful and revealing, the book deepens our appreciation of Monet's art and allows us to experience anew his gift for bringing the natural world to life.

Claude Monet's extensive work is revealed in numerous images. He was a painter who like no other moved perception to the center of his artistic activities. Nature became his own studio. This resulted in fascinating landscapes of different times and seasons in the mirror of wind and weather.

This beautiful slipcased volume offers an intimate tour inside Monet’s home and through the idyllic Giverny garden that inspired his most iconic paintings. Monet first spotted the village of Giverny from the window of a train and then relocated to the rural haven outside Paris in 1883. Monet was an artist with a passion for painting landscapes and outdoor scenes, and the garden at Giverny soon became the Impressionist master’s greatest artistic accomplishment and a catalyst for his work. In 1890, Monet began renovating it, installing a picturesque water lily pond inspired by the Japanese prints he avidly collected. The setting of Monet’s Water Lilies series—his most famous works—it is now the most visited garden of its size in the Western world. The beautifully vivid illustrations of Monet’s paintings, his home, and the grounds give readers unprecedented access into the flowery paradise to which Monet dedicated the last forty years of his life. Lovers of garden design and Impressionist art are invited on an intimate tour via this handsome volume.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to 'plein-air' landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, 'soleil levant').This book is the most comprehensive collection of Claude Monet's Paintings ever published, covering the artist's entire 64 years of creation; a keepsake for the connoisseur of fine art. On 484 pages, this book includes a detailed biography, a resume written by Monet himself (in English and French), and over 900 paintings on 460 colour plates (large format 8½ x 11 inches), as well as a special section of Monet's famous Water Lilies Series, and the Series of the London Parliament Buildings and Bridges. Monet's paintings obtain record prices at auctions. 'Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil,' an 1873 painting of a railway bridge spanning the Seine near Paris, was bought for a record $41.4 million at Christie's auction in New York on 6th May 2008. The previous record for Monet's painting stood at $36.5 million. 'Le basin aux nyphéas' (from the water lilies series) sold at Christie's 24 June 2008 for £40,921,250 ($80,451,178) setting a new auction record for the artist.