Jackie Wullschl ger 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.
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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*Spectator*
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