What sets this study apart from the vast literature on Monet is Gedo's focused, jargon-free, accessible, psychoanalytic assessment of Monet and his relationship with his first wife and mistress, Camille Doncieux, and the impact of this complex relationship on the artist's work. Using this psychobiographical approach in conducting a careful reading of primary source material and Monet's paintings, Gedo (independent scholar) does much to debunk a good deal of the mythology surrounding the artist's life at this period. She offers fresh insights into the content of many of Monet's major paintings, particularly his figurative works that feature Camille as a model or subject. So, for example, Gedo proposes that Monet's Camille (or The Woman in the Green Dress) from 1866, via its composition, "functioned as a metaphor for the uncertainty characterizing the relationship between lovers," in addition to exposing publicly Camille as Monet's mistress. As is the danger when applying psychoanalysis to the study of art history, some of Gedo's assertions and interpretations approach the level of implausibility; however, these flights of psychoanalytic fancy are few and far between. The writing is engaging, endnotes are extensive but not oppressive, and the book is sufficiently illustrated with many images in color. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by D. E. Gliem.

Paul Czanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin. The names of these brilliant nineteenth-century artists are known throughout the world. But what is remembered of their wives? What were these unknown women like? What roles did they play in the lives and the art of their famous husbands? In this remarkable book of discovery, art historian Ruth Butler coaxes three shadowy women out of obscurity and introduces them for the first time as individuals. Through unprecedented research, Butler has been able to create portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuretthe models, and later the wives, respectively, of Czanne, Monet, and Rodin, three of the most famous French artists of their generation. The book tells the stories of three ordinary women who faced issues of a dramatically changing society as well as the challenges of life with a striving genius. Butler illuminates the ways in which these model-wives figured in their husbands achievements and provides new analyses of familiar works of art. Filled with captivating detail, the book recovers the lives of Hortense, Camille, and Rose, and recognizes with new insight how their unique relationships enriched the quality of their husbands artistic endeavors."

A vividly rendered portrait of both the rise of Impressionism and of Monet, the artist at the center of the movement. It is, above all, a love story of the highest romantic order.

Julie Manet, the niece of Edouard Manet and the daughter of the most famous female Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot, was born in Paris on 14 November 1878 into a wealthy and cultured milieu at the height of the Impressionist era. Many young girls still confide their inner thoughts to diaries and it is hardly surprising that, with her mother giving all her encouragement, Julie would prove to be no exception to the rule. At the age of ten, Julie began writing her `memoirs' but it wasn't until August 1893, at fourteen, that Julie began her diary in earnest: no neat leather-bound volume with lock and key but just untidy notes scribbled in old exercise books, often in pencil, the presentation as spontaneous as its contents. Her extraordinary diary - newly translated here by an expert on Impressionism - reveals a vivid depiction of a vital period in France's cultural history seen through the youthful and precocious eyes of the youngest member of what was surely the most prominent artistic family of the time.

A major reassessment of the methods and meaning of impressionism At pivotal moments in his career, Claude Monet would go out with a fellow artist, plant his easel beside his friend’s, and paint the same scene. Painting with Monet closely examines pairs of such works, showing how attention to this practice raises tantalizing new questions about Monet’s art and about impressionism as a movement. Is impressionist painting an objective attempt to capture reality as it really is? Or is it a subjective expression of the artist’s unique way of perceiving things? How can artists create a movement without conformity extinguishing individuality? Harmon Siegel reveals how Monet explored problems like these in concrete, practical ways while painting alongside his teachers, Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind; his friends, Frédéric Bazille and Pierre-Auguste Renoir; and his hero, Édouard Manet. At a time of major cultural upheavals, these artists asked how we can know reality beyond our personal perception. Siegel provides new insights into the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical stakes for these painters as they responded to a rapidly changing society. Beautifully illustrated, Painting with Monet sheds critical light on how Monet and his fellow impressionists, painting side by side, professed their capacity to know the world and affirmed their belief in what Siegel calls the reality of others.

Presents the paintings Monet executed on the Italian and French Rivieras in 1884 and 1888

Impressionist master Claude Monet began over forty versions of Waterloo Bridge during his three London sojourns between 1899 and 1901. He viewed his paintings of the landmark bridge both individually and as an ensemble, collectively expressing his sense of the essential subject - the atmosphere and colors of the fog-bound landscape of London's Thames River. Monet struggled to complete these paintings after his return to France, where he re-worked many of the canvases in his Giverny studio, releasing them for sale over the course of several years. The exhibition Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process brings together eight paintings from the famous London series. Scholarly essays and an in-depth technical study of the Memorial Art Gallery's Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun (1903) explore Monet's artistic vision as well as the process by which he struggled to achieve that vision. NANCY NORWOOD is Curator of European Art, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York.