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Monet came first, and it isn't close. If you're asking who came first, Claude Monet or Van Gogh, the answer is Claude Monet: born in Paris in 1840, thirteen years before Vincent van Gogh was born in the Dutch village of Zundert on 30 March 1853. By the time Van Gogh decided to become an artist, at 27, Monet had already given Impressionism its name.
And yet people keep mixing them up. It makes sense. Both painted sunflowers, both painted gardens, both are hung in the same rooms of the same museums, and their prints fight for the same wall in the same dorm rooms. What makes the question interesting is the overlap: two painters from different generations whose lives crossed in one city, through one man who sold paintings for a living.
Here's the whole timeline, then the points where the two actually touched.
Two lives, laid side by side
Monet's career was well underway before Van Gogh picked up a brush. Monet grew up in Le Havre and left Normandy for Paris in 1862. In 1867 he painted the sunlit terrace at Sainte-Adresse, flags over the sea. That same school year, a fourteen-year-old Vincent was sitting in a classroom in Tilburg, a secondary school he would quit halfway through for reasons nobody knows.
If you want to see how early Monet was, look at the Monet paintings people still copy most, in the Monet works the studio paints by hand. Almost all of the famous ones were finished while Van Gogh was still selling prints, preaching or failing exams.
| Year | Claude Monet | Vincent van Gogh |
|---|---|---|
| 1840 | Born in Paris | Not born yet |
| 1853 | Age 12 or 13, growing up in Le Havre | Born in Zundert, 30 March |
| 1872 | Paints Impression, Sunrise in Le Havre, around November | Starts writing to his brother Theo |
| 1874 | Shows it at the group exhibition in Nadar's old studio | Working for the art dealer Goupil in London |
| 1875–1876 | Painting in Argenteuil | Transferred to Goupil in Paris, then dismissed |
| 1883 | Moves to Giverny | Drawing and painting in the Netherlands |
| 1886–1888 | Exhibiting in Paris galleries | Lives with Theo in Paris |
| 1890 | Buys the Giverny property | Dies in Auvers-sur-Oise, 29 July |
| 1926 | Dies in Giverny |
The table hides the strangest detail. Van Gogh was an art dealer's clerk before he was a painter, and he worked for the same firm that would later sell Monet's pictures.
1872: the painting that named a movement
Around November 1872, Monet stayed at the Hôtel Amirauté in Le Havre and painted the outer harbor from his window, early in the morning, in just a few hours. The orange sun and the ferrymen's rowboats went in last. When he needed a title for the catalogue of the 1874 group show, he knew the canvas couldn't pass as a proper view of Le Havre, so he called it Impression, the hazy harbor at dawn.
The critic Louis Leroy took that word and turned it into a jab: his article of 25 April 1874 was titled "L'exposition des impressionnistes." Within days another critic, Jules Castagnary, used the word as praise, and it stuck. You can read the full story of the canvas at the Marmottan, where it has hung since 1940. There's more on how Monet ended up leading the movement in a separate piece.
Where was Van Gogh in April 1874? Twenty-one years old, working at Goupil's London branch, where he'd been transferred the year before. He spent his free hours at the British Museum and the National Gallery looking at Millet and Jules Breton. Peasant painters. Nothing like Monet.
Paris, the city they shared
This is the shared city in the title. Monet was born in Paris and built his career there. Van Gogh lived in Paris twice, and the second stay changed everything about how he painted.
First visit: 1875, the wrong reasons
Goupil moved Vincent to Paris in 1875. He could have walked into the new painting at almost any moment. He didn't. He was turning religious, filling his letters to Theo with Bible verses and sermons, and he was growing sick of selling art. The feeling was mutual, and Goupil let him go in 1876.
Second visit: 1886, the right ones
Ten years later he came back as a painter and moved in with Theo in Montmartre. Theo managed the Goupil branch on the Boulevard Montmartre, by then renamed Boussod, Valadon & Cie, and he'd been pushing Vincent for a while to lighten his palette. Vincent's first reaction to the Impressionists was bad. He found them careless and badly drawn, and later admitted to his sister that this had been his own first impression, as it was nearly everyone's.
It didn't last. Within months he was writing, in English, to the painter Horace Livens that he had "much admired certain Impressionist pictures", naming a Degas nude and a Claude Monet landscape in his letter to Livens from the autumn of 1886. In the spring of 1887 the brothers went together to the international exhibition at Georges Petit's gallery, which ran from 8 May to 8 June and included Monet landscapes painted on the Mediterranean.
You can trace what happened next on the canvases. His two years in Paris took him from the brown of The Potato Eaters to short strokes of bright colour. Then the city wore him out. He arrived in Arles on 20 February 1888.
Did Van Gogh know Claude Monet?
Not personally, as far as anyone can show. There's no record of the two men meeting. But Van Gogh knew Monet's work well, and his brother knew Monet.
Theo sold his first Monet for Boussod, Valadon on 7 April 1885, and dealt in more of his work as the decade went on. In May 1888, while Vincent was in Arles, Theo went to Giverny to see Monet. The result was a small show: ten landscapes Monet had painted in Antibes, which Theo bought for 11,900 francs, agreeing to split any resale profit with the painter. It opened in June 1888 at Theo's gallery. Vincent, stuck in Provence, congratulated his brother and said he was sorry to miss it in a letter from mid-June 1888.
So the link is real, and it runs through one person. Theo stood between the painter who was already famous and the one who would only become famous after his death.
What Van Gogh wanted from Monet
Here's the part I find most revealing. In May 1888, Van Gogh put Monet at the top of the scale and asked who would do the same for people. "What Claude Monet is in landscape, the same thing in figure painting," he wrote to Theo, and wondered who would manage it. You can read the passage in his letter of 4 May 1888, where he decides the painter of the future will be a colourist unlike any before him.
That's the difference between them in one line. Monet wanted to catch how light fell on a harbor or a field at a given hour. Van Gogh took the bright palette and short strokes and bent them toward feeling. He never became a pure Impressionist. He arrived late, borrowed what he needed, and left.
Who painted the better sunflowers?
Monet got there first, again. His Bouquet of Sunflowers dates from 1881, a big canvas about 101 by 81 cm. Van Gogh's first sunflowers came in Paris in 1887, cut heads lying on their backs, and the famous vases followed in Arles in 1888.
The two actually got compared in their own time. In November 1888, with Gauguin staying with him in Arles, Vincent told Theo that Gauguin had seen Monet's sunflowers in a large Japanese vase and thought them very fine, but liked Vincent's better. Vincent's answer, in the letter about Gauguin's verdict, was modest: "I'm not of that opinion."
I side with Gauguin. Monet's bouquet is lovely, a decorative still life by a painter who mostly worked outdoors. Van Gogh's are portraits of flowers. He gave them the weight Monet gave to a cathedral front. Both versions sit in the same museum in New York, a few galleries apart, and it's worth seeing them on the same afternoon.
Is The Starry Night a Monet?
No. The Starry Night is Van Gogh's, painted at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in June 1889. Around 18 June that year he told Theo he had just made a new study of a starry sky. Monet, at that point, was about to start the series of the 1890s: haystacks in the fields around Giverny, then poplars, then the front of Rouen Cathedral at every hour of the day.
The mix-up usually comes from the swirling brushwork. Monet's late water lilies are loose too, but they're built from reflections and floating color, not from the churning lines Van Gogh used on the sky.
The 36 years Monet had left
Van Gogh died on 29 July 1890, two days after shooting himself in a wheatfield near Auvers. He left more than 850 paintings, nearly all made in ten years. Monet was 49 or 50 that summer. He'd lived at Vétheuil from 1878, where he painted the family garden at Vétheuil, and had moved to Giverny in 1883. In 1890, the year Vincent died, Monet had the money to buy the Giverny property outright.
Almost everything people picture when they hear "Monet" today came after Van Gogh was gone. The pond, the Japanese bridge and the water lilies he kept painting belong to those last three and a half decades. One of the water lily canvases at the Marmottan is dated 1897, seven years after Van Gogh's death. When Monet's son Michel left the museum his father's remaining works in 1966, more than a hundred canvases came with it, including the late ones that were never shown in Monet's lifetime. A short life of Monet from Giverny covers those years, and there's a longer walk through the garden he spent them painting.
So the fair way to put it: Monet came first and also stayed last. He was painting before Van Gogh started and kept painting for 36 years after Van Gogh stopped. If you want the rest of the great names in one place, start with the paintings everyone wants on a wall.
A harbor at dawn, over the sofa
If the sunrise at Le Havre or the lily pond stayed with you, Art & See's painters copy Monet by hand in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. You can browse every Monet canvas we reproduce, from the Normandy coast to Giverny, and pick the one that fits your room.
