Claude Monet

Hello. My name is Claude Monet, and I was a painter. I was born in a big, busy city called Paris, France, on November 14th, 1840. When I was a little boy, I did not enjoy sitting still in my school classroom. I would much rather be outside with my sketchbook. Instead of doing my lessons, I loved to draw pictures. My favorite thing to draw was funny pictures of my teachers. I always carried my sketchbook with me, ready to capture anything I saw that I thought was interesting or silly. Drawing was my favorite way to spend the day.

When I was a young man, around the year 1858, I met a very kind painter named Eugène Boudin. He taught me something that changed my life forever. He showed me how to paint outside in the fresh air and sunshine, instead of inside a dark, stuffy room. I felt so much joy setting up my easel, which is a stand for a painting, right by the sea. I loved to paint the bright sunshine as it sparkled on the water and the big, fluffy clouds that floated across the sky. Painting outdoors made me feel so happy and free, and I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

My friends and I had a new idea about painting. We didn't want to paint things to look perfect and still, like a photograph. Instead, we wanted to paint things just as we saw them in a single, quick moment. We used fast, bright brushstrokes to show how the light from the sun could change the way everything looked. In 1874, I showed one of my paintings at an art show. It was a picture of a harbor at sunrise, and I called it 'Impression, Sunrise.' A writer who saw it called me and my friends 'Impressionists' because we were painting our impression, or the feeling we got, from that moment. The name stuck, and we started a whole new way of painting.

In 1883, I moved to a beautiful house in a small village in France called Giverny. It was there that I decided to create my own special place to paint. I spent many years planting a wonderful garden filled with all of my favorite kinds of flowers. The colors were amazing. I even built a pond and a pretty green bridge over it, just like the ones I had seen in Japanese pictures. I filled the pond with lovely water lilies that floated on the surface. My garden became my greatest joy and my favorite thing to paint for the rest of my life.

As I grew older, my eyesight started to get blurry, but that didn't stop me from painting. I just painted the bright colors that I saw in my mind and remembered from my garden. I lived to be 86 years old. Today, my paintings of haystacks, cathedrals, and especially my water lilies are in museums all around the world for everyone to enjoy. I hope that when you see my paintings, you can feel the sunshine and the happiness I felt while creating them.