The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Hardback) /anglais - Hardcover

ROE SUE

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701175052 ISBN 13: 9780701175054

Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK, 2007

Synopsis

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussman's spectacular transformation. For over twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian war and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvasses depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossom and boating scenes. This intimate, colourful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes as well as their studios and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind their paintings.

About this title

About the Author

Sue Roe is a freelance writer and teacher. A former Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and current lecturer at the University of Sussex, she is the author of a novel, Estella, Her Expectation, a collection of poems, The Spitfire Factory, and Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf's Writing Practice. She is also co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, and her most recent book is the widely praised Gwen John: A Life. She lives in Brighton.

Reviews

From Monet and Pissarro's first meeting in Paris in 1860 to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel's influential 1886 Impressionist exhibition in New York City, the group known as the Impressionists—Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Morisot and Cassatt—struggled to build their reputations, support themselves financially and create meaningful personal lives. In this meticulously researched and vividly written book, British writer Roe (Gwen John) argues that their drive for success was the strongest unifying factor among this diverse group of artists, including the antisocial, celibate Degas, the socialist Pissarro and the chronically depressed Sisley, who resented the Impressionists' meager public appreciation until the very end of his life. Roe's nuanced portraits of these artists include personal details both small—the American Cassatt's booming voice and "atrocious" French accent—and significant—Manet's illegitimate son and his upper-middle-class family's elaborate efforts to conceal the child's existence. The result is a comprehensive and revealing group portrait, superbly contextualized within the period's volatile political, socioeconomic and artistic shifts. Roe's book will be of great interest to both art and social historians as well as to the general reader. 16 pages of color illus., b&w illus; 1 map. (Nov.)
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*Starred Review* As a grand urban-renewal project engineered by Baron Hausmann transformed Paris under Napoleon III, a group of independent, tenacious, and ambitious painters brought equally radical change to the realm of art. Roe constructs a penetrating group portrait of the revolutionary artists dubbed the impressionists for their atmospheric landscapes and forthright depictions of everyday life. Here, masterfully set against a panoramic rendering of their turbulent times, are Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Morisot, and Cassatt, each incisively defined as an individual and in terms of their complex interactions as they devoted themselves to paintings that met only with derision. The entwined stories Roe tells about these disciples of light, color, atmosphere, and commonplace beauty are fascinating and heartbreaking. Roe writes entrancingly of artistic bliss, rowdy cafe life, profound friendships, and transcendent love. But most of the impressionists endured not only contempt but also poverty, familial conflicts, war, and tragedy. Roe's scintillatingly detailed and empathic chronicle of the on-the-edge lives of these paradigm-altering artists will deepen appreciation for the emotional depths of the impressionists' indelible paintings. And for readers interested in learning more about them, see the adjacent Read-alikes column. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701175052
• ISBN 13: 9780701175054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368