Claude Monet (1840–1926) was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, where his family moved when he was five. As a teenager he was known for his caricatures. On the beaches of Normandy he met Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to paint in oils and outdoors, in front of the subject. In 1859 he went to Paris to study, and later worked in the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met future Impressionists.
In the 1870s, living at Argenteuil on the Seine near Paris, he painted some of his best-known pictures. His Impression, Sunrise, a view of the harbour of Le Havre at dawn, hung in the first independent exhibition of 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar. A hostile critic took its title as a jibe, and the name Impressionism stuck. In 1883 Monet rented a house at Giverny, in Normandy, where he later bought the property and created the garden with its pond and Japanese bridge.
He devoted his later years to series of paintings of a single subject under changing light: haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, and above all the water lilies of his own pond. In his last years cataracts clouded his sight, and he underwent surgery in 1923. He died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged eighty-six, and is buried in the village cemetery.