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We started at the Yahoo! Master Painters category. From there, we jumped to the Claude Monet subcategory and used the "just this category" restricted search feature to scan the list of sites for biographical information about the beloved and prolific Impressionist. The Life of Claude Monet, though hardly the most artistic or flashiest Monet site, describes the painter's boyhood in the port town of Le Havre, France, and the influence of his friendship with an older local landscape painter, Eugene
Boudin. By the time he was a teenager, Monet was earning commissions for his caricature work. By the age of nineteen, he'd left for Paris and had begun to paint at the Atelier Suisse, where he befriended Camille Pissarro. After a two-year military service stint in Algeria resulted in typhoid fever, Monet's aunt bought his way out of the army on the condition that he enroll in the formal l'École des Artistes for an art education. Monet opted instead to study at Gleyre's avant-garde salon and studio, where he established lifelong friendships with Frédéric Bazille, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. The three began painting together en plein aire (in the outdoors) in the forest of Fontainbleau, south of Paris. During the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871),
Monet spent time in England with Pissarro and studied the work of contemporaries Turner and Constable. He then returned to France, where he helped launch Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. Their 1874 group exhibition featured Monet's painting Impression:Sunrise, which lent its name to the developing movement. Monet and his growing household eventually settled in Giverny, Monet's home and studio for the rest of his life. Much of this information was corroborated by the Monet entry from the Web Museum (Nicholas Pioch's venerable fine arts resource) and again by Encyclopedia Britannica's Monet biography.
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