A magnificent new biography of the founder of Impressionism
In the course of a long and exceptionally creative life, Claude Monet revolutionized painting and made some of the most iconic images in western art. Yet behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown.
Jackie Wullschl ger's enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting. He was as obsessional in his love affairs as in his love of nature, and changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the centre of his life changed. His work also responded intensely to outside cataclysms - the Dreyfus Affair, the First World War. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was his closest friend. Rich intellectual currents connected him to writers from Zola to Proust; affection and rivalry to Renoir, Pissarro and Manet.
Monet said he was driven 'wild with the need to put down what I experience'. This rich and moving biography immerses us in that passionate experience, transforming our understanding of the man, his paintings and the fullness of his achievement.
Industry Reviews
Jackie Wullschlaeger's magisterial and utterly engrossing biography of Monet is a tour de force. Many of us know the painter but this beautifully written and meticulously researched book brings alive Monet as a man, and fundamentally changes our understanding and appreciation of his life and work. A triumph.
Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschlaeger's pages is vulnerable, relentless, complex, believable. He has found a biographer who cares deeply for painting, and who tells his life-story always wondering, as we must, how Monet's pursuit of brightness became the grave, even tragic, thing it is. Only a critic of Wullschlaeger's gifts could make us look at Impression: Sunrise again and see the uncertain northern light in it. Her book is an utterly absorbing read.
Jackie Wullschlaeger brings Monet to life with thrilling immediacy as he moves via a series of terrifying leaps into the unknown from nineteenth-century naturalism into Impressionism and ends up, after a long and astonishing career, bringing painting to the brink of twentieth-century abstraction. This is a captivating biography of great emotional warmth, delicacy and pictorial intelligence - and so gripping I found it difficult to put down.
This is a very thorough and enjoyable biography of a very great painter, perhaps the greatest of the nineteenth century. He also loved smoking. -- David Hockney
You come away with a clearer picture not only of Monet ... but a generation of artists; you understand Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne and the dawn of impressionism better for the light that Wullschlaeger shines on it allThis magical biography ... is a suitably sybaritic book. Really, you should read it on a terrace with a glass of something pink ... This is a book to be savoured like an orange candied in honey ... Usually when reviewing a big biography I feel relieved at the end. This time I felt bereft ... It's an intoxicating read. -- Laura Freeman * The Times *
Wullschlaeger writes magnificently about the paintings ... Years of looking, together with masses of original research, have yielded a richly detailed book that will be invaluable for years to come. -- Sue Prideaux * Literary Review *
Jackie Wullschlaeger's rich and detailed biography..beautifully illustrated...has done Monet the service of turning him back into a rounded human being. -- Christopher Bray * Mail on Sunday *
