Claude Monet (1840–1926), born in Paris and educated at the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Monet took his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. Around 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.

In 1861 Monet took an art course at a university, but he was soon disillusioned by the education he was getting so he became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.

During the Franco-Prussian war, he went to England where he studied the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color.