His parents called him Oscar, not Claude

On the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, Claude Monet was born on November 14, 1840. The residence of his family was only a few houses away from the birthplace of Louis Napoleon III, France's first president. He was the second child of second-generation Parisians Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. He was baptized as Oscar-Claude on May 20, 1841, in the nearby parish church Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, although his parents just nicknamed him Oscar, and he began signing his early works "O. Monet". Despite having received a Catholic baptism, Monet eventually rejected religion.

His family relocated to Le Havre in Normandy around 1845. His mother, a singer, encouraged Monet's ambition to pursue an artistic profession. His mother supported his decision to enroll in art school to advance his career and pushed him to pursue his dreams. His father, however, was less amenable to the notion of his son pursuing painting as a career. Monet's father, a wholesale trader, wanted him to join the family's food and ship-handling businesses, which is one of the interesting facts about Claude Monet.