Claude Monet was born in Paris and grew up in the city of Le Havre in Normandy. It was his meeting with the painter Eugène Boudin that led him to start depicting nature in paint. He arrived in Paris in 1859 and joined Charles Gleyre’s studio, where he made the acquaintance of the painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. Edouard Manet influenced him in the early 1860s, although he was already starting to produce more personal landscapes. He took refuge in London during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and moved to Argenteuil upon his return to France. Claude Monet is known as one of the most famous painters in the impressionist movement, which took its name from one of his compositions: Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), painted in 1872 (Musée Marmottan, Paris). He took part in most of the impressionist exhibitions from 1874 onwards.
In 1883, he settled in his property in Giverny in Normandy. It was during this period that he began to depict various subjects in the form of series, including haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral. From the late 1890s until his death in 1926, the painter essentially devoted himself to the Nymphéas (Water Lilies) cycle, of which the Musée de l’Orangerie possesses a unique set. The artist created several works specifically for the building, and presented the Nation with the cycle’s first two large-format panels as a symbol of peace on November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice was signed. He also designed a unique space in the Museum, made up of two elliptical rooms and, as he himself said, giving beholders the “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore”, making the Orangerie’s Nymphéas a creation by the artist that has no parallel anywhere else in in the world.
The collection also includes a canvas by Claude Monet, Argenteuil, painted in 1875 and acquired by Domenica, Paul Guillaume’s widow, circa 1955.