Monet: The Restless Vision

Description:

The Art Book of the Year, The Times

A Telegraph, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Economist, Tablet and Evening Standard Book of the Year

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. Misunderstood and mocked at the beginning of his career, he risked everything to pursue his original vision. Although close to starvation when he invented impressionism on the banks of the Seine in the 1860s-70s, in the following decades he emerged as the powerful leader of the new painting in Paris at one of its most exciting cultural moments. His symphonic series Haystacks, Poplars, and Rouen Cathedral brought wealth and renown. Then he withdrew to paint only the pond in his garden. The late Water Lilies, ignored during his lifetime, are now celebrated as pioneers of twentieth century modernism.

Behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown. Jackie Wullschlager's enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting.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. Enduring devastating bereavements, he pushed the frontier of painting inward, to evoke memory and the passing of time. 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.

Review: Jackie Wullschlager'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. -- Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery
Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschlager'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 Wullschlager'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. -- T.J. Clark
Jackie Wullschlager 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. -- Hilary Spurling
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
A deeply researched and immensely readable biography that gives the reader a compelling and original understanding of the works and the life of a universally admired but misunderstood painter. -- Miranda Seymour
This magical biography ... is a suitably sybaritic book. Really you should read it on a terrace with a glass of something pink ... 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 Wullschlager shines on it all ... Usually when reviewing a big biography I feel relieved at the end. This time I felt bereft ... This is a book to be savoured like an orange candied in honey ... It's an intoxicating read. -- Laura Freeman * The Times *
Wullschlager 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 Wullschlager'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 *
Wullschlager writes powerfully ... with [a] subtlety that characterizes every page of this immense, engrossing biography ... It would be hard to overstate the scale and ambition of the project. -- Ruth Scurr * Times Literary Supplement *
It is a story Wullschlager tells with aplomb ... few have engaged so thoroughly with the journals, memoirs and rich cache of [Monet's] letters. Wullschlager uses these to animate a life of plunging lows and soaring highs...failures and successes, despair and happiness ... This, though, is not simply good history or good biography ... it is her deep engagement with Monet's art that makes this book such a pleasure to read. -- Honor Clerk * Spectator *
Ground-breaking. * Bookbrunch *
Magnificent. * The TLS Podcast *
In a colourful new biography, Jackie Wullschlager reveals the tempestuous man behind the canvases ... Monet has found a sympathetic, skilled biographer. Ms Wullschlager has a gift for seeing and sifting ... This biography most excels when it explains Monet's paintings. * Economist *
Eloquent and penetrating. This book has made me look again at familiar paintings, revisit well-worn assumptions about Impressionism, and given me hours of joy just savouring exceptionally well-crafted sentences and observations. * Financial Times Books of the Year *
This bold and inspiring biography ..the first account of the Impressionist's private life, and a work of impressionism in its own right. Jackie Wullschlager captures her subject in sun and shade and shifting colour. -- Frances Wilson * Telegraph *
Enthralling ... Jackie Wullschlager gives us a portrait of Monet as full and as carefully calibrated as we could ever wish for. Part of its strength is that it embeds the life story so completely into the making of the art, painting by painting. Some of its finest moments show off some of Wullschlager's best qualities as a journalist, giving us the essence of a painting in just a few sentences, demonstrating with a few deft strokes of the pen, how it contributes to the ever-thickening skein of the ever-shifting moods of the Monet story. -- Michael Glover * Tablet *
Fascinating. * Art Newspaper *
The many currents of a passionate life flow through this superbly accomplished biography. * Telegraph Books of the Year *
By delving deep into his correspondence and researching his life in detail, Wullschlager emerges with a strikingly different portrait of the artist. Passionate, edgy, prickly and unstable, her Monet, the unrecognisable Monet, is a powerful new character in art. -- Waldemar Januszcyck * Sunday Times Books of the Year *
A beautifully written and insightful account of Monet, the man and the artist, and the first substantial biography in English. The author is art critic for the Financial Times and writes with intelligent sympathy for the man as well as insightfully on the art * Evening Standard Books of the Year *
This fine study by the distinguished art critic Jackie Wullschlager sets the Father of Impressionism within the turbulence of late 19th-century France and the first two decades of the 20th century - revealing the upheavals of a complex private life as he moved from naturalism to impressionism... This critical and perceptive biography of a dynamic painter deserves to win prizes -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail Books of the Year *
Anyone who has followed Wullschlager's amazing writing and art criticism over the years will probably not be surprised to find that her deep dive into the life of the great Claude Monet is both comprehensive and engrossing... a "tour de force." And anyone who has marveled at Monet's dreamlike waterlilies, haystacks, views of the Waterloo Bridge, or the Houses of Parliament will come away with an even deeper appreciation of him as an artist, father and husband -- Eileen Kinsella * Artnet *
Exemplary -- Michael Prodger * New Statesman *
Wullschlager's biography describes him excellently and makes shrewd deductions, while leaving a core of unknowability (of which Monet would doubtless have approved)... His true biography, as Wullschlager understands, is the biography of his art -- Julian Barnes * London Review of Books *