EXHIBITION ON SCREEN I, Claude Monet

From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at arguably the world’s favourite artist – through his own words.Whose life and work I have long admired.
This new film tells his moving story, crafted from over 2,500 letters and featuring his most loved works of art,narrated by Henry Goodman, I, Claude Monet reveals  a  new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Claude Monet  (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.
After his devoted companion  and first wife Camille Doncieux  died  he went to live with Ernest and Alice Hoschede and their six children. He grew closer to Alice, and the two eventually became romantically involved. Ernest spent much of his time in Paris, and he and Alice never divorced. Monet and Alice moved with their respective children in 1883 to Giverny, a place that would serve as a source of great inspiration for the artist and prove to be his final home. After Ernest's death, Monet and Alice married in 1892.
In 1911, Monet became depressed again  after after the death yet again  of  another beloved  companion  in this case Alice. Then in 1912, he developed cataracts in his right eye. This crushing news  led to a bout of depression, and thoughts of suicide  tell me about it, that kept him from painting  but ,Monet  found at least solace in his garden and purpose in his work and managed to at least  somehow to overcome his grief. Over the next decade, Monet worked on an unprecedented scale creating canvases roughly six and a half feet high and 14 feet wide. In 1916, he built a new studio to house the epic images of his water lilies, and, in 1918, to honor the Armistice of the First World War, he promised the paintings as a gift to the nation. He painted more than 40 panels for his Grandes Decorations, and, in the spring of 1925, he selected 22 of them to be installed in two oval rooms in Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris. He imagined the effect as being surrounded by the natural beauty of his  water garden soothing the nerves and calming the spirit.
Claude Monet died of  cancer on December 3, 1926, at the age of 86. He left instructions for a simple funeral, and the only tribute on his coffin was a sheaf of wheat. He had created his own legacy in painting the "restful sight of those still waters" that preserved the experience of his long and productive life, spent pursuing the fleeting impressions of nature through the testament of his brush.
Monet left a vast body of work to be admired and cherished.
Discover who Claude Monet really was, in this in this revealing new biography  that is in cinemas across the UK  from February 21st.