Monet Av Jackie Wullschläger

This glorious biography brings to life the man behind the famous artist. Jackie Wullschlager's account is the first to reveal how Claude Monet's turbulent private life was an essential ingredient in the radical impressionism that he invented. Using unpublished and never-before translated sources, Jackie beautifully tells Monet's life as he felt it: his pleasures and sadness, his loves and disappointments, his thoughts and memories, and how all this inspired what and how he painted.Impressionism's impulse to interiority was shaped by Monet's intensity of emotion, his insistence on painting what he called 'what I myself experience, I alone', and also by his rich intellectual life and connections to writers from Zola to Proust. Wullschlager shows 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 Hoschede, and the particular atmosphere which each brought to Monet's homes and to his painting.She argues that they spurred him to fresh achievements, and that understanding their roles encourages us to rethink how he worked, and how his paintings still work on us. This is a story about changing ideals of beauty, about originality and creativity, resilience and survival.