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 Using unpublished and never-before translated sources, Jackie beautifully tells Monet's life as he felt it: his pleasures and sadness, his loves and disappointments, what he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.
