Impressionist Art For The Home With The Poster Store

A few months back we had the pleasure of working with The Poster Store, and we are proud to announce that we are doing so again.

In the last post where we featured them, I mentioned that we don’t really know what it is that we are looking for when it comes to art in our home.

However, we think that we have finally found it. As we both have matured, we are noticing that we are leaning toward more classic and timeless styles. And that has allowed us to start appreciating more impressionist art.

So when we saw the Claude Monet prints on The Poster Store website, we decided to see how well they fit into our home.

Claude Monet also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was 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, Sunrise.

Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On May 20, 1841, he was baptized into the local church parish, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette as Oscar-Claude. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery store business, but Claude Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.

On the first of April 1851, Monet entered the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. He first became known locally for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook 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 met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting.

On 28 January 1857 his mother died. He was 16 years old when he left school, and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

In 1893, Monet, a passionate horticulturist, purchased land with a pond near his property in Giverny, intending to build something "for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint." The result was his water-lily garden. In 1899, he began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond, completing twelve paintings, including the present one, that summer. The vertical format of the picture, unusual in this series, gives prominence to the water lilies and their reflections on the pond.

If you enjoy learning about impressionist art, and other forms of art, one of the things that has been helping me grow my knowledge is Jennifer L. Scott’s ‘Chic Assignment ‘ series over on YouTube.

What kind of art do you have up in your home? Did you struggle to find your ‘style’ as we have?