Monet was born on November 14, 1840, in Paris, but he spent most of his childhood in Le Havre. There, in his teens, he showed a talent for drawing caricatures, and in about 1858 he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who encouraged him to paint out of doors rather than in the studio. In 1859, Monet committed himself to a career as an artist, and moved to Paris. During the 1860s he was associated with Édouard Manet, and with other aspiring French painters destined to form the Impressionist school—notably Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir,  Alfred Sisley,  Berthe Morisot Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas    

By the mid-1880s Monet, generally regarded as the leader of the Impressionist school, had achieved significant recognition and financial security. Despite the boldness of his colour and the extreme simplicity of his compositions, he was recognized as a master of meticulous observation, an artist who sacrificed neither the true complexities of nature nor the intensity of his own feelings. In 1890 he was able to purchase some property in the village of Giverny, not far from Paris, and there he began to construct a water garden (now open to the public)—a lily pond arched with a Japanese bridge and overhung with willows and clumps of bamboo. Paintings of the pond and the water lilies occupied him for the remainder of his life. Throughout these years he also worked on his other celebrated "series" paintings, groups of works representing the same subject—haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the River Seine, Houses of Parliament—seen in varying light, at different times of the day or seasons of the year. Monet continued to paint almost up to the time of his death, on December 5, 1926, at Giverny.