This sweeping, generous narrative takes its title from the Monet\u2019s famous contribution to a groundbreaking 1874 group show in Paris in which he and a group of well-known colleagues, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas, introduced the world to impressionism. The author uses the long arc of Monet\u2019s career, his many sales and exhibitions, as the backdrop to his personal life. Readers first meet Monet while he\u2019s still with his first wife, Camille, and they meet Alice when she\u2019s married to businessman and art collector Ernest Hoschede. Joaquim fills chapters with details of the Hoschede family\u2019s life, and the slow progression of Monet as he moves from penury and obscurity to fame, while also including controlled digressions about his contemporaries: \u201cTheir respect and affection for one another went unspoken, but it was all there, manifested in a friendly glance, a knowing smile, a reluctant nod, a familiar chuckle.\u201d The narrative becomes more tense and emotional when, in the wake of Camille\u2019s death, Alice leaves her spouse to live with Monet and begins brashly and affectionately speaking of him in public, \u201cthe way a woman talks about the man she cares about most in the world, the man who is her lover and confidant.\u201d Sometimes the author\u2019s prose can feel overcooked (\u201cOverwhelmed and completely caught off guard, in an explosive flash of time, like a paper doll crushed and twisted by a reckless hand, she crumbled to the floor\u201d). However, much of the work will very favorably remind readers of such excellent novels as Irving Stone\u2019s Vincent Van Gogh-centered Lust for\u00a0Life (1934), or Rembrandt\u00a0(1961) by Gladys Schmitt.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This sweeping, generous narrative takes its title from the Monet\u2019s famous contribution to a groundbreaking 1874 group show in Paris in which he and a group of well-known colleagues, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas, introduced the world to impressionism. The author uses the long arc of Monet\u2019s career, his many sales and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}