9781422271780

CLAUDE MONET

other hand, he was self-indulgent—some said he ate enough for four ordinary appetites—could be vindictive and taciturn, and was crafty and manipulative with money. When only fifteen, he was selling caricatures of locals for twenty francs in the small stationery and framing shop in Le Havre, which had been owned by the painter Eugène Boudin. Boudin was a landscape painter of the local coastal scenery and, importantly for Monet’s development, painted en plein air— on site in the open air. He quickly transmitted his love of the coast he knew so intimately to Monet. Boudin himself had been encouraged to paint by some of his customers, painters

who themselves had an influence in Monet’s life, such as Thomas Couture, a well-known academician, with whom Manet was a pupil for six years; Jean-François Millet, a painter of genre subjects of peasant scenes of pathos and simplicity; and Constant Troyon, a painter of animals— particularly cattle—in quiet landscapes. Painting outdoors with oil paint was not common or very practical until the convenient means of transporting the paint in tubes was introduced in the 1840s. Boudin was a determined practitioner who convinced Monet that it was essential to capture “one’s first impression.” That was the one essential principle that guided Monet and

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