Monet in Le Havre

This lecture will review recent research and discoveries concerning the decisive period from 1845, when his family settled in Le Havre, to 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris.

These three decades saw the birth of an artistic vocation. In Le Havre, the young Monet drew on the motif, tried his hand at pastels, drew caricatures, composed skilful still lifes and discovered landscape painting with Eugène Boudin.

From the cliffs of the Pointe de la Hève to the harbour basins, his early works reveal a vision and gradually assert a strong pictorial ambition. Drawing on previously unpublished archives, correspondence and photographs, the talk sheds light on the family context, the networks of support - including his brother Léon, the Gaudiberts - and the decisive influences that shaped the emergence of the man who would become one of the founders of Impressionism.