EXTRA CREDIT!!!!! Read and report...

Here it is! The first EXTRA CREDIT on the blog!

Read the entry below and tell me all about it when you return to school this week! You will receive 5 extra credit points.

CLAUDE MONET and the IMPRESSIONISTS

Claude Monet was born in 1840. He was the student of Eduard Manet. At the time Monet was alive, the accepted and famous painters in Paris all submitted their work to THE SALON, an art gallery. If you could get your work into the Salon, you had it made and were considered a successful painter. Monet took his first painting called IMPRESSION OF A SUNRISE to the Salon hoping it would be accepted. This is what it looked like...

The people at the Salon said; "What?! It's not finished! Look, we can still see the brush strokes! This is an under painting! Bring it back if and when you finish it, or better yet, don't come back at all!"

Monet could have given up...but he didn't. He and some of his friends who had the same beliefs about painting said "FINE! We don't need you! We'll hold our own art show!"

And that is just what they did! It turned out that the people of Paris loved the artwork and gave the whole group of painters a new name taken from Monet's picture, Impression of a Sunrise. They became known as...THE IMPRESSIONISTS!

The Impressionists wanted to capture how light changed the colors of things. They painted outside. That meant they had to paint quickly because the light changes so fast!

Monet liked to return to the same place over and over again to paint it in lots of different types of light. Here is a series of Haystack in a field near his home...

Here is a series of the Rouen Cathedral...

As Monet got older, he liked to paint in his own garden, which was beautiful. He didn't realize that his eyesight was getting worse. When he finally realized the problem and had it fixed with a surgery, he was upset at how bad the colors were in many of his garden paintings. He destroyed most of them and painted new ones! There are a few paintings he didn't destroy, though. Here is a before the surgery picture and an after surgery picture!

Claude Monet died in 1926.