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Published Apr 2010
352 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris.
But once there he is confronted with obstacles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a war that led him away from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, enduring friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that together would come to be known as the Impressionists, and that supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of their time.
His muse, his best friend, his passionate lover, and the mother to his two children, Camille stayed with Monet—and believed in his work—even as they lived in wretched rooms, were sometimes kicked out of those, and often suffered the indignities of destitution. She comforted him during his frequent emotional torments, even when he would leave her for long periods to go off on his own to paint in the countryside.
But Camille had her own demons – secrets that Monet could never penetrate, including one that when eventually revealed would pain him so deeply that he would never fully recover from its impact. For though Camille never once stopped loving the painter with her entire being, she was not immune to the loneliness that often came with being his partner.
A vividly-rendered portrait of both the rise of Impressionism and of the artist at the center of the movement, Claude and Camille is above all a love story of the highest romantic order.
"A convincing narrative about how masterpieces are created and a detailed portrait of a complex couple:" - Publishers Weekly
"Fans of Tracy Chevalier, Susan Vreeland, and Sarah Dunant will want to check out this rich, artsy read." - Library Journal
"What a man! I am in awe before him. To be swept up by this novel which reveals the man and woman behind - no, in, the waterlily paintings, the seascapes and landscapes, is, and must be, a heartbreak. For me, reading Claude and Camille is like seeing old friends, learning them anew, from the inside, their passionate lives pulsing again by virtue of Stephanie Cowell's sure pen. The story is lovely, touching, delicately written, extraordinarily compelling, and nearly all true. Read it with a book of Monet's paintings by your side, and be prepared to marvel, and to weep." - Susan Vreeland, author Luncheon of the Boating Party and Girl in Hyacinth Blue
"With elegant prose that blends color, light, and shadow to perfection, much as Monet did in his canvasses, Stephanie Cowell offers us a gorgeously rendered tale of love, genius, and haunting loss set against the dramatic backdrop of a world on the verge of inescapable change." - C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephanie Cowell was born in New York City to a family of artists and fell in love with Mozart, Shakespeare, and historical fiction at an early age. She began printing stories in a black and white school notebook at about nine years old and in her teens wrote several short novels which remain in a dark box. She learned something though, because by twenty, she had twice won prizes in a national story contest.
Then she left writing for classical singing. She sang in many operas and appeared as an international balladeer; she formed a singing ensemble, a chamber opera company, and so on. The translation of a late Mozart opera returned her to writing once more.
Her first published novel was Nicholas Cooke: Actor, Soldier, Physician, Priest followed by two other Elizabethan-17th century ...
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