Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell

 Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter and founder of a new movement called Impressionism derived from the title of his painting Impression, which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates.

This story starts with him at the age of 17. He is failing at school and getting estranged from his father.

What makes sense to him at this point is to take an older painter’s offer of Eugene Boudin and study painting with him. Hid dream of being caricaturist has to be put on hold.

The same summer his mother passes away and he throws himself at painting with Boudin for the next three years. 

He continues his art schooling in Paris. There, he meets Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne, and Edouard Manet. The last one “was the only one of them who had already gained some public recognition.”

When he needs to clear his head, he goes for a walk by the River Seine. One day, while on his walk he decides to enter a bookshop. There he sees a young woman with red hair, the one he saw at a train station four years earlier. He asks her to model for his new painting of picnickers.

Camille becomes his love and his greatest muse. 

Once his painting of The Woman in the Green Dress becomes success, his father admits “that perhaps he had been wrong to stand against his gifted son.”

After many struggles, Monet and his artist friends put an exhibit, after which they become recognized as Impressionists. At last, a name was born, Impressionism, to their struggles to be recognized.

The book skillfully-depicts painters’ struggle to achieve recognition as most of them during their time were not recognized. It also, beautifully presents love of hardship and friendship lasting through good and bad times with the love of his life as well as his friends.

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