I Perhaps Owe Having Become A

This remark is found in AZQuotes citing Claire Joyes's Monet at Giverny (1975), and represents one of Monet's own reflections on his artistic development. Before he took up landscape painting seriously, the young Monet had been taught caricature by the local artist Eugène Boudin, who encouraged him to work outdoors. Boudin introduced him to plein air painting on the Normandy coast, an encounter Monet later credited as decisive. The remark acknowledges that without flowers — and by extension the close observation of natural color — he might never have developed the visual sensibility that defined his work.