Sources of inspiration

Monet's first mentors were two landscapists specialising in coastal scenery: Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind. Monet painted alongside them on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany during the 1850s and early 1860s, responding to their swift, light-infused manner.

Monet's more formal training commenced in Paris after 1862. The academic painters Auguste Toulmouche and Charles Gleyre had obtained success for their polished, finely detailed paintings, typified by Toulmouche's Reading lesson.

However, Monet was much more interested in the group of landscape painters who had come of age in France during the 1830s, working in Barbizon and the Fontainebleau forest: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, and others. Their greatest legacy to the Impressionists was the practice of painting en plein air (in the open air).

Generally, plein-air paintings were considered sketches or studies, not fully fledged works of art, but Corot set a precedent for the Impressionists by exhibiting an open-air study in the Salon exhibition of 1848.

At the same time, Monet and the Impressionists drew inspiration from the realist painters Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. Monet formed close friendships with both of them: Courbet's dense structures of paint and Manet's intense focus on colour prefigured the complex make-up of the Impressionist canvas.

Source: Maloon, Terence. Monet and the Impressionists exhibition brochure.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2008

Works in this section

Gathering wood in the forest of Fontainebleau  c1850–60, Théodore Rousseau.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: bequest of Mrs David P Kimball

Morning near Beauvais  c1855–65, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection

Twilight  1845–60, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: bequest of Mrs Henry Lee Higginson

Washerwomen  c1855, Jean-François Millet.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Mrs Martin Brimmer

Priory at Vauville, Normandy  1872–74, Jean-François Millet.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw Jr and Mrs Marian Shaw Haughto

Field outside Paris  1845–51, Constant Troyon.
Oil on paperboard. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Henry C and Martha B Angell Collection

Landscape with stag  1873, Gustave Courbet.
Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of New South Wales: purchased 1997

Reading lesson  1865, Auguste Toulmouche.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Francis A Foster

Fashionable figures on the beach  1865, Eugène Boudin.
Oil on panel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Mr and Mrs John A Wilson

The beach  1864, Eugène Boudin.
Oil on panel. Art Gallery of New South Wales: purchased 1926

Harbour scene in Holland  1868, Johan-Barthold Jongkind.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Count Cecil Pecci-Blunt

Basket of fruit  c1864, Édouard Manet.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: bequest of John T Spaulding

In the exhibition

< Monet's early career
> Monet and Japanese art
> Monet's series