Winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize and the Franco-British Society Literary Award
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize

A magnificent 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. Behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown. Jackie Wullschläger's enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting.

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.

Autorentext

Jackie Wullschlager

Klappentext

This full, personal biography brings to life the unknown man behind the famous artist. Jackie Wullschlager traces Claude Monet's turbulent emotional life and how it informed his paintings. Using unpublished and never-before translated sources, Jackie beautifully tells Monet's life as he felt it: his pleasures and sadness, his loves and disappointments, what he thought and what he felt, and how all this inspired his choices of what and how to paint.

Wullschlager argues that three times, Monet's art changed decisively when the woman sharing his life changed. She excavates the barely recognized contributions and the voices of Camille Doncieux, Alice Raingo and Blanche Hoschedé, and the special atmosphere which each brought to Monet's homes and to his art. She argues that they do not diminish the force of Monet's originality, but instead encourage us to rethink how he worked, and how his paintings still work on us. Impressionisms radical impulse to interiority was shaped by Monet's intensity of emotion, his insistence on painting what he called 'what I myself experience, what I alone' and also his rich intellectual life and connections to writers from Zola to Proust.

This is a story about changing ideals of beauty, about originality and creativity, resilience and survival.