This book tells the beautiful story of Monet’s life. It obviously focuses on his life as an incredible artist and the instigator of impressionism. Along with his friends, Renoir mainly, he rejected traditional academic painting techniques, preferring to paint outside and capture the effects of light and atmosphere. He will evolve into painting series, the Haystacks, the Cathedral of Rouen, London and the Thames, and the well-known Nympheas, drifting slowly through time to the borders of abstraction. In parallel with his artistic work, this book recounts his intimate life, his affection for Camille and later Alice, seven children running around, for years impoverished, yet unwaveringly dedicated to his art and his family. He was surrounded by loving women until he died in 1926 at the age of 86 at Giverny, his beloved garden. An anchoring of the artist in his time and real life adds a fantastic understanding of the birth of impressionism and the human nature of Monet. This book is quite dense, yet it is extremely enriching.
“The madness of continuing struck him when an oak he had been depicting burst into leaf, and the only way to save five paintings was to persuade its owner to strip the foliage. Fifty francs produced “permission to remove the leaves from my beautiful oak tree… It was quite an effort to bring big enough ladders into this ravine. At last it’s done, two men have been working on it since yesterday. Isn’t it something to finish a winter landscape at this time?” he asked Alice on 9 May.”