French Impressionist Painter, 1840-1926 Claude Oscar Monet (14 November 1840 C 5 December 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. Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris . He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubree Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptised into the local church parish, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugene Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting. On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre. After several difficult months following the death of Camille on 5 September 1879, a grief-stricken Monet (resolving never to be mired in poverty again) began in earnest to create some of his best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s Monet painted several groups of landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French countryside. His extensive campaigns evolved into his series' paintings. Camille Monet had become ill with tuberculosis in 1876. Pregnant with her second child she gave birth to Michel Monet in March 1878. In 1878 the Monets temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hosched, (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. Both families then shared a house in Vetheuil during the summer. After her husband (Ernest Hoschede) became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium, in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vetheuil; Alice Hosched helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children. They were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880 Alice Hosched and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet still living in the house in Vetheuil. In 1881 all of them moved to Poissy which Monet hated. From the doorway of the little train between Vernon and Gasny he discovered Giverny. In April 1883 they moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband, Alice Hosched married Claude Monet in 1892.   Related Paintings of Claude Monet :. | Detail from the Water Lily Pond | Le Bateau-atelier | Le Bateau atelier | The Goods Train | The Grand Canal |
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Tivadar Kosztka Csontvary
born 1853 - d. 1919) was a Hungarian painter. He was one of the first Hungarian painters to become well known in Europe. Csontvery was born on 5 July 1853 in Kisszeben, Seros County, Kingdom of Hungary (today Sabinov, Slovakia), and died 20 June 1919 in Budapest. His ancestors were Poles who settled down in Hungary. Although Csontvery was obsessed with his Magyar roots, he himself grew up speaking Slovak mixed with German. He was a pharmacist until his twenties. On a hot sunny afternoon, 13 October 1880, e when he was 27 years old e he experienced a mystic vision. He heard a voice saying "you will be the greatest sunway painter, greater than Raphael!" He took journeys around Europe, visited the galleries of the Vatican, then went home to collect money for his journeys working as an apothecary. From 1890 onwards he traveled around the world. He visited Paris, the Mediterraneum (Dalmatia, Italy, Greece), North Africa and the Middle East (Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Syria) and painted pictures. He painted his major works between 1903 and 1909. He had some exhibitions in Paris (1907) and Western Europe. Most of the critics in Western Europe recognized his abilities, art and congeniality, but in the Kingdom of Hungary during his life he was considered to be an eccentric crank for several reasons, e. g. for his vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, anti-nicotinism, pacifism, his latent, but more and more apparent schizophrenia and his cloudy, prophetic writings and pamphlets about his life (Curriculum), genius (The Authority, The Genius) and religious philosophy (The Positivum). Even though later he was acclaimed, during his lifetime Csontvery's visionary, expressionistic style found little understanding. A loner by nature, the master's mental balance was upset by his efailuree impairing his creative power. Little did he know that some years after his death, an entire museum in Paris, Hungary, would be devoted to his paintings, and that worldwide appreciation of his works would be in constant ascendancy. Many painters, e.g. Picasso added a stone to Csontvery's cairn.
JanVermeer
1632-1675 Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer is now recognized as one of the great Dutch painters, but while he was alive he could barely make ends meet, and his artistic achievement was almost entirely ignored for 200 years after his death. Little is known about his personal life, other than he died poor and young and left behind a wife and eleven children. Vermeer is admired for his realistic style, his subtle use of color and light and his unusual and inventive brush technique, but fewer than forty of his paintings exist. His most famous works include domestic scenes such as Girl With a Peal Earring (1665) and The Music Lesson (1662-65), and tranquil landscapes such as The Little Street (1657-58) and View of Delft (1659-60). Although his actual birth and death dates are unknown, Vermeer was baptized 31 October 1632 and buried 15 December 1675... During his career he used the names Johannes van der Meer, Johannes Vermeer and Jan Vermeer... He was played by actor Colin Firth in the 2003 film Girl With A Pearl Earring, which also starred Scarlett Johansson as the girl.
Jacques-Eugene Feyen
(1815, in Bey-sur-Seille, Meurthe-et-Moselle - 1908) was a French painter. The elder brother of painter Auguste Feyen-Perrin, Jacques-Eugene enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Paul Delaroche. He had a notable career at the Paris Salon from 1841 to 1882. Vincent Van Gogh was a fan of Feyen and describes him as, "one of the few painters who pictures intimate modern life as it really is, and does not turn it into fashion plates." He set up studio and settled in summer in the town of Cancale.He spent several months every year painting views of Cancale, the oyster-picking Cancalaises and the bay of Mont St. Michel, and his paintings still enjoy a steady fame.