Monet

Jackie Wullschläger’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 Wullschläger’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 Wullschläger’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 Wullschläger 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, Cézanne and the dawn of impressionism better for the light that Wullschläger 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 *
Wullschläger 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 Wullschläger’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 *
Wullschläger 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 Wullschläger tells with aplomb … few have engaged so thoroughly with the journals, memoirs and rich cache of [Monet’s] letters. Wullschläger 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 *

Jackie Wullschlager is Chief Art Critic of the Financial Times. Her books include the prize-winning Hans Christian Andersen - The Life of a Storyteller (2000) and Chagall - Love and Exile (2008), which won the Spear’s Biography of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. She lives in London.

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