Monet: The Restless Vision

"This is a beautiful book. It’s full of light. Wullschläger writes so beautifully about the paintings, but also, she’s got such emotional intelligence. She’s got this vast panoply of Monet’s correspondence: thousands and thousands of letters. With the knowledge of the art, the person, and the other characters, she creates for us what she calls this ‘restless vision’, and that’s what it is. She’s trying to reconstruct Monet’s inner life, to tell Monet’s life and how he felt it. As I read it, at first Monet is not an attractive character. You think, ‘This is absolutely why, as a woman, you should not live with an artist.’ It’s full of scrounging letters, and the suffering of these women who are, of course, immortalised in beautiful portraits by him, but following him around or being abandoned by him. You think, ‘Well, it’s the art, of course,’ but she explains quite how it is that he comes to revolutionise art and to create these ravishing works that are just luminous. She writes very beautifully about it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As life goes on, instead of being improvident, he becomes very wealthy. Finally, you see him at Giverny employing six gardeners, one of whom has to dust off the water lilies! There’s great pathos. You’re won over to him, as his life goes on, and see how he, too, has suffered for his art. It’s a rich and moving account. I’ve read quite a lot of art history, and it can be pretty rebarbative, but these are exquisite accounts of the paintings. She persuades you—if you needed persuading—just how important a figure he is. It’s an account of these friendships. You see the moral compromises that he makes for his art, and all the scrounging and the rest that goes on. He suffers for it, and so do those around him."

"In June, the FT ‘s chief art critic Jackie Wullshläger won the 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize, a £5,000 British literary award now in its 21st year, for Monet: The Restless Vision. Wullshläger’s biography is the first full account of the great Impressionist’s tempestuous private life—and how these dynamics played out in his art: he was “wild,” he once wrote, “with the need to put down what I experience.” For all his contemporary ubiquity—find his famous water lilies on fridge magnets, tea towels, posters—”Monet was essentially ignored after his death,” noted reviewer Hugh Eakin in the New York Times. “For decades, his wildly abstract late work went unsold.” Only towards the end of the 20th century “did Monet begin to be rediscovered as the ur-modernist we know today.” Wullshläger’s “lively” biography, based on “meticulous” research does much to illuminate a much-shrouded life of turbulence and workhorse ambition."