Claude Monet Trivia
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50 free Claude Monet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Claude Monet trivia quiz follows the founder of Impressionism from a Paris birth and a Le Havre childhood, through the caricatures he sold at 15, the mentor Eugène Boudin who took him outdoors, the army years in Algeria and the studio of Charles Gleyre where he met Renoir. It covers the Salon rejections, Camille Doncieux, exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War, the meeting with dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and the floating studio at Argenteuil. The middle of the quiz is about the movement itself: the 1874 exhibition, the hostile critic who coined 'Impressionism' from Impression, Sunrise, the price the painting failed to fetch, the Gare Saint-Lazare canvases and the death of Camille. From there it moves to Giverny, the gardens and the seven gardeners, the haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral series, the Savoy Hotel views of the Thames, Venice, the cataracts he was too frightened to have removed, Clemenceau's 'No black for Monet!', and the water lilies that fill the Orangerie. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Pablo Picasso and Renaissance Art quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Monet grew up on the Normandy coast, but in which city was he born in 1840?
Paris
Paris. The family left when he was five for the Normandy coast, where the beaches and fast-changing weather of his childhood shaped the way he would later paint light.
Q 02What did Monet's father want him to go into instead of art?
The family grocery business
The family grocery business, which also supplied ships in port. His mother, a trained singer, took his side over art, but she died in 1857.
Q 03How did the teenage Monet first earn money from art?
Drawing caricatures of acquaintances
Drawing caricatures of acquaintances. He started at 15, and at up to 20 francs a sheet they sold well enough to give him real savings by the time he left home to study art.
Q 04Which Normandy seascape painter persuaded the teenage Monet to try painting outdoors?
Eugène Boudin
Eugène Boudin. Monet's life as a painter began with their outings, and in 1874 the older man hung his own work beside his former pupil's at the first Impressionist exhibition.
Q 05Who are the woman and boy in Monet's Woman with a Parasol?
His wife and son
His wife and son: Camille and seven-year-old Jean, caught from below on a windy summer walk. About a decade later he painted the pose twice more, with his stepdaughter Suzanne holding the parasol.
Q 06Monet paid to keep which riverside trees standing after their village put them up for auction mid-series?
Poplars
Poplars. The row along the Epte came up for auction in 1891 before he had finished, so he paid out of his own pocket to keep it standing; a timber merchant took the trees once the series was done.
Q 07Where did the young Monet do his army service in 1861-62, coming home excited by its colours?
Algeria
Algeria. By most accounts he caught typhoid there and was sent home to recover, and his family then bought him out of the rest of his service.
Q 08Which future Impressionist did Monet meet as a fellow student in Charles Gleyre's studio in 1862?
Auguste Renoir
Auguste Renoir. The two, with Bazille and Sisley, soon fell out with Gleyre's academic teaching and went off together to paint in the open air in the forest of Fontainebleau.
Q 09Which Monet canvas, so tall he lowered it into a trench to paint the top, did the 1867 Salon refuse?
Women in the Garden
Women in the Garden. His friend Frédéric Bazille bought it in monthly instalments to keep him afloat, and in 1921 the French state acquired the painting its Salon jury had turned away.
Q 10Camille Doncieux, mother of Monet's son Jean, first entered his life in what role?
As a model for his paintings
As a model for his paintings. She posed for Camille, the portrait that won him praise at the 1866 Salon, but his father disapproved of the affair and cut off his money.
Q 11Why did Monet move to London in 1870?
To avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War
To avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War. His close friend Frédéric Bazille made the opposite choice, enlisted that August and was killed in action in November.
Q 12Which dealer, met in London in 1870-71, became Monet's first and primary art dealer?
Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel. Monet complained in 1886 that the dealer cared only about the United States, yet it was those American sales that finally made the painter financially secure.
Q 13In the 1870s, Monet fitted out a small riverboat as what?
Q 21Monet's bankrupt patron Ernest Hoschedé moved his family in with the Monets; whom did Monet later marry?
Hoschedé's widow
Hoschedé's widow. Alice married Monet in 1892, a year after the ruined department-store magnate died, and her daughter Blanche went on to marry Monet's son Jean.
Q 22When Monet rented his Giverny farmhouse in 1883, he repainted its grey shutters which colour?
Green
Green. He painted them in his first year there, along with a dining room in two shades of yellow, and bought the house outright in 1890 once his pictures were selling.
Q 23Monet attended the 1883 funeral of which fellow painter, days after moving to Giverny?
Édouard Manet
A floating studio
A floating studio. It let him set up his easel on the water itself and paint the river and its reflections from viewpoints no bank could give him.
Q 14What, embedded in the paint of Monet's The Beach at Trouville, shows he painted it on the spot?
Grains of sand
Grains of sand. The sea breeze blew them into the wet paint in the summer of 1870, as Monet worked on the beach in the weeks after his wedding.
Q 15Monet and his friends held their breakaway 1874 exhibition in the former studio of which photographer?
Félix Nadar
Félix Nadar. Monet had painted the street below from those very rooms, and his Boulevard des Capucines hung in the show; the group called itself the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers.
Q 16When a critic first called Monet's circle 'Impressionists' in 1874, how did he mean it?
As an insult
As an insult. Louis Leroy took the word from the title of Monet's Impression, Sunrise to sneer that the pictures were unfinished, and the name stuck to the whole movement.
Q 17Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of which town?
Le Havre
Le Havre. Asked for a catalogue title, Monet said the hazy harbour scene could hardly pass for a view of the town, so he told them to put 'Impression'.
Q 18Monet handed his giant Luncheon on the Grass to a landlord over unpaid rent; what ruined it in storage?
Damp
Damp. When he bought the canvas back years later parts of it had rotted, so he cut the damage away and kept the pieces that survive, two of them now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Q 19Which place did Monet paint a dozen times in early 1877, showing several views at the third Impressionist exhibition?
Gare Saint-Lazare
Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the terminus for trains to Normandy that he had known since childhood, and he got permission to set up inside and paint its smoke and steam.
Q 20What did Monet paint in the hours after his first wife, Camille, died in 1879?
Her face on her deathbed
Her face on her deathbed. He confessed years later that even in his grief he had caught himself noting the changing colours of her skin by sheer reflex.
Édouard Manet. Six years later Monet repaid the friendship by raising a public subscription to buy Manet's Olympia from his widow and present it to the French state.
Q 24Monet's 1884 trip to paint the palms and gardens of Bordighera took him to which country?
Italy
Italy. He planned three weeks in the seaside town and stayed nearly three months, writing home that its palm trees were exasperating to paint.
Q 25When Monet planned his lily pond, what did Giverny's farmers fear his exotic plants would do?
Poison the water
Poison the water. Monet was furious at the objection, but the prefect ruled in his favour, and the pond he then dug became the great subject of his old age.
Q 26At which event did Monet first see the newly bred coloured water lilies he later planted at Giverny?
A World's Fair display
A World's Fair display. The hybrids on show there were bred by Joseph Latour-Marliac, and when Monet dug his pond a few years later he stocked it with lilies ordered from the same grower.
Q 27Which subject did Monet paint for the first of his series to go on show, in 1891?
Haystacks
Haystacks. Fifteen of the canvases went on show in May 1891 and most sold within a month, and from then on he built his working life around painting in series.
Q 28Which cathedral's façade did Monet paint more than thirty times from rented rooms across the square?
Rouen Cathedral
Rouen Cathedral. One of his makeshift studios was the fitting room of a lingerie shop; he reworked the canvases at home for a year and then showed twenty of them in 1895.
Q 29Painting his series, why did Monet switch between several canvases over a single day?
The light kept changing
The light kept changing. He gave each canvas to one effect of light and weather, then set it aside for the next as the day moved on.
Q 30From which London hotel did Monet paint the Thames on his stays from 1899 to 1901?
The Savoy
The Savoy. He chose it for its sweeping view of the river, and on three visits he painted Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge from his rooms dozens of times each.