One of the most famous and admired painters of all time, Claude Monet
(1840- 1926) was the architect of impressionism--a revolution that gave
birth to modern art. His technique of painting outside at the seashore
or in city streets was as radically new as his subject matter: the
landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris.
Working with unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed
that his work was both natural and true, and therefore, entirely novel.
In Monet, James H. Rubin, one of the world's foremost specialists in
nineteenth-century French art, traces Monet's development, from his
early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of water lilies and
his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped
shape Monet's work, including the utopian thought that gave rise to his
politics, his interest in Japanese prints and gardening, and his
relationship with earlier French landscape painters and contemporaries
such as E´douard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Featuring more than 150 color illustrations of his key works, Rubin
establishes Monet as the inspiration for generations of avant-garde
artists and a true patriarch of modern art.