The force of nature that drove Claude Monet

There have been some really good biographies of artists over recent years and what distinguishes the best of them is their sense of context and a lucid prose free from the jargon of the art historian. In the end, of course, any work of art has to be able to stand by itself, but for Jackie Wullschläger her appreciation of Monet’s paintings has been immeasurably deepened by her sense of the man behind them.

‘My approach,’ she writes, ‘stems from the belief that painters transform the raw material of experience into art’, and that material, both the familiar external events and, more illuminatingly, the inner man, is what she gives us here. 

Oscar Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a marine merchant. His father’s business interests soon took the family to Le Havre and it was there that the young Monet – known by his first name, Oscar – grew up in a comfortable bourgeois environment.