A meeting with Monet

A luminous biography by Jackie Wullschlager gives a fresh appreciation of how central Monet was to modern art

- RahulJacob

The death of Claude Monet's first wife, Camille, at the age of 32, prompted the artist to rush to a canvas and paint her. In life, she had acted as a muse and a model, sometimes depicted multiple times in different costumes and poses in the artist's early Impressionist masterpieces. Virginia Woolf once wistfully wrote that death would be the one experience she would not be able to observe, but in this last painting of Camille, done in 1879, Monet gave us a facsimile of the despair one feels watching a loved one ebb away. This master painter of scenes of water used the imagery of a cold, grey river in what his biographer Jackie Wullschläger describes as a "torrent of brushstrokes (that) submerges and sweeps away Camille's body".

Off-canvas, a complex emotional drama was playing out. Monet was grieving his wife and filled with foreboding at the prospect of bringing up his children alone. But, he had fallen in love with Alice Hoschedé, the wife of a spendthrift textile businessman who had bankrupted himself-in large part buying Monet's art. To economise, the two families had taken a residence together away from Paris. Alice had doubled as mother to her own brood of children and Monet's while acting as palliative nurse to Camille.

Wullschläger's biography, Monet: The Restless Vision-incredibly the first in English of the French Impressionist artist whose work was so pivotal in transforming the world's views of art-puts Monet's relationships with these two women at the centre of the narrative. Wullschläger navigates the artist's convoluted private life and the growing public prominence of his art with equal flair.