Oscar Claude Monet. Claude Monet born 14 November 1840 in Paris. When the boy was five years old, the family moved to Normandy, in Le Havre. Father wanted to Claude became a grocer and continued the family business. Youth Monet, as he subsequently noted, in essence, was a youth of a tramp. He spent more time in the water and on the rocks than in the classroom. School he, by nature unruly, always felt like a prison. He had fun painting blue cover notebooks and using them for portraits of their teachers, done in a very irreverent, comical manner, and in this entertainment soon reached perfection. At fifteen, Monet was known all over Le Havre as a caricaturist.