Monet

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 *
Ground-breaking. * Bookbrunch *
Magnificent. * The TLS Podcast *
In a colourful new biography, Jackie Wullschläger reveals the tempestuous man behind the canvases ... Monet has found a sympathetic, skilled biographer. Ms Wullschläger 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 *