Claude Monet, Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1899. Princeton University Art Museum.
In the course of a long and exceptionally creative life, Claude Monet revolutionised 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 Wullschläger is Chief Art Critic of the Financial Times. Her acclaimed and enthralling biography, Monet: The Restless Vision, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet’s turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting.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: The Restless Vision by Jackie Wullschläger is published by Penguin (12 October 2023).
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