Claude Monet has begun to capture the…

Claude Monet has begun to capture the effects of light reflected from objects and figures.

His Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La femme à la robe verte), painted in 1866, had brought him recognition and is one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she is the model for the figures in Women in the Garden of the following year, and will be also for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868.

Camille becomes pregnant and gives birth to their first child, Jean in 1867.

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 Rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris.

He is the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians.

On May 20, 1841, he had been baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents had called him simply Oscar.

In 1845, his family had moved to Le Havre in Normandy.

His father had wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet had wanted to become an artist.

His mother had been a singer.

On April 1, 1851, Monet had entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts.

Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs.

Monet had also undertaken his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David.

On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857, he had met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who had become his mentor and taught him to use oil paints.

Boudin had taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.

Both had received the influence of the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind.

On January 28, 1857, his mother had died.

Leaving school at the age of sixteen, he had gone to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

In Paris for several years, Monet has met other young painters who will become friends and, later, fellow impressionists; among them is Édouard Manet.

In June 1861, Monet had joined the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year commitment, but, two years later, after he had contracted typhoid fever, his aunt had intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete an art course at an art school.

It is possible that Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter.

Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet had become a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he had met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley.

Together they share new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what will later come to be known as Impressionism.