Claude Monet Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (; ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter, 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, soleil levant" ("Impression, Sunrise"), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to
Jean Monet (son of Claude Monet) in the country, while Monet tried to obtain monies for survival. However, without money for a medical treatment, Jean became quite ill. After a dramatic period experienced by Camille and Jean, Claude was able to obtain funds for housing for his family in Le Havre. His parents were married on June 28, 1870. When Jean was a young child his mother and father had fled France during the Franco-Prussian War. They returned by the summer of 1872 when Claude painted his five-year-old son on a hobby horse in the garden of the home the family rented in Argenteuil near Paris.