The Life of a Storyteller

Hans Christian Andersen

The definitive life, re-issued to coincide with the extensive celebrations building up to mark the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth in 2005

The first English language biographer to have returned to the original Danish sources, Wullshlager creates a fascinating picture of Andersen as a deeply troubled man, as far from Danny Kaye's all-singing version as it is possible to imagine. Desperately sensitive, sexually confused and socially awkward, Andersen found grace and acceptance through the creation of a distinct and beguiling literary world, becoming, as was once said of Tolkien, 'the creative equivalent of a people'. Wullschlager's achievement is to demonstrate the unity of his troubled life and and the soaring achievement of his work. He appears in this biography more various and more flawed, but also more convincing and more impressive, than ever before.

Jackie Wullschläger

Jackie Wullschläger's magisterial and utterly engrossing biography of Monet is a tour de force. Many of us know the painter but this beautifully written and meticulously researched book brings alive Monet as a man, and fundamentally changes our understanding and appreciation of his life and work. A triumph.

Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery

Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschläger's pages is vulnerable, relentless, complex, believable. He has found a biographer who cares deeply for painting, and who tells his life-story always wondering, as we must, how Monet's pursuit of brightness became the grave, even tragic, thing it is. Only a critic of Wullschläger's gifts could make us look at Impression: Sunrise again and see the uncertain northern light in it. Her book is an utterly absorbing read.

Jackie Wullschläger brings Monet to life with thrilling immediacy as he moves via a series of terrifying leaps into the unknown from nineteenth-century naturalism into Impressionism and ends up, after a long and astonishing career, bringing painting to the brink of twentieth-century abstraction. This is a captivating biography of great emotional warmth, delicacy and pictorial intelligence - and so gripping I found it difficult to put down.

This is a very thorough and enjoyable biography of a very great painter, perhaps the greatest of the nineteenth century. He also loved smoking.

A deeply researched and immensely readable biography that gives the reader a compelling and original  understanding of the works and the life of a universally admired but misunderstood painter.

This magical biography ... is a suitably sybaritic book. Really you should read it on a terrace with a glass of something pink ... You come away with a clearer picture not only of Monet ... but a generation of artists; you understand Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne and the dawn of impressionism better for the light that Wullschläger shines on it all ... Usually when reviewing a big biography I feel relieved at the end. This time I felt bereft ... This is a book to be savoured like an orange candied in honey ... It's an intoxicating read.

Wullschläger writes magnificently about the paintings &hellip; Years of looking, together with masses of original research, have yielded a richly detailed book that will be invaluable for years to come.

Jackie Wullschläger's rich and detailed biography..beautifully illustrated...has done Monet the service of turning him back into a rounded human being.

Wullschläger writes powerfully ... with [a] subtlety that characterizes every page of this immense, engrossing biography ... It would be hard to overstate the scale and ambition of the project.

It is a story Wullschläger tells with aplomb ... few have engaged so thoroughly with the journals, memoirs and rich cache of [Monet's] letters. Wullschläger uses these to animate a life of plunging  lows and soaring highs...failures and successes, despair and happiness ... This, though, is not simply good history or good biography ... it is her deep engagement with Monet's art that makes this book such a pleasure to read.

In a colourful new biography, Jackie Wullschläger reveals the tempestuous man behind the canvases ... Monet has found a sympathetic, skilled biographer. Ms Wullschläger has a gift for seeing and sifting ... This biography most excels when it explains Monet's paintings.

Eloquent and penetrating. This book has made me look again at familiar paintings, revisit well-worn assumptions about Impressionism, and given me hours of joy just savouring exceptionally well-crafted sentences and observations.

This bold and inspiring biography ..the first account of the Impressionist’s private life, and a work of impressionism in its own right. Jackie Wullschläger captures her subject in sun and shade and shifting colour.

Enthralling ... Jackie Wullschläger gives us a portrait of Monet as full and as carefully calibrated as we could ever wish for. Part of its strength is that it embeds the life story so completely into the making of the art, painting by painting. Some of its finest moments show off some of Wullschläger's best qualities as a journalist, giving us the essence of a painting in just a few sentences, demonstrating with a few deft strokes of the pen, how it contributes to the ever-thickening skein of the ever-shifting moods of the Monet story.

The many currents of a passionate life flow through this superbly accomplished biography.

By delving deep into his correspondence and researching his life in detail, Wullschläger emerges with a strikingly different portrait of the artist. Passionate, edgy, prickly and  unstable, her Monet, the unrecognisable Monet, is a powerful new character in art.

A beautifully written and insightful account of Monet, the man and the artist, and the first substantial biography in English. The author is art critic for the Financial Times and writes with intelligent sympathy for the man as well as insightfully on the art

This fine study by the distinguished art critic Jackie Wullschläger sets the Father of Impressionism within the turbulence of late 19th-century France and the first two decades of the 20th century — revealing the upheavals of a complex private life as he moved from naturalism to impressionism... This critical and perceptive biography of a dynamic painter deserves to win prizes

Anyone who has followed Wullschläger’s amazing writing and art criticism over the years will probably not be surprised to find that her deep dive into the life of the great Claude Monet is both comprehensive and engrossing... a “tour de force.” And anyone who has marveled at Monet’s dreamlike waterlilies, haystacks, views of the Waterloo Bridge, or the Houses of Parliament will come away with an even deeper appreciation of him as an artist, father and husband

Wullschläger's biography describes him excellently and makes shrewd deductions, while leaving a core of unknowability (of which Monet would doubtless have approved)... His true biography, as Wullschläger understands, is the biography of his art

Wullschläger tells us to look again [at] Impressionism's heroic tale ... A new biography [that] gives fresh insight into the making of the Monet myth.

An Impressionist biography of the central Impressionist ... What others treat as mundane context Wullschläger turns into full-on characterization. She is equally sharp on her hero's day-to-day [so that] the overall shape of his eighty-six years is clear.

A sumptuous biography .... spans the painter’s lengthy life and career, a portrait of an 
artist mercurial and materialist, ambitious and conceited, yet unstintingly loyal to all in 
his orbit. Just as the Impressionists liberated easel painting from the treacly academic styles 
prized by the Salon, Wullschläger liberate[s] Impressionism from the clichés of 
dorm-room posters and greeting-card sentimentality ... a delight.

extensive and thoughtful … fascinating … The momentum of this full biography is impressive

The Restless Vision

In the course of a long and exceptionally creative life, Claude Monet revolutionized painting and made some of the most iconic images in western art. Yet behind this great and famous artist is a volatile, voracious, nervous yet reckless man, largely unknown. 
 
Jackie Wullschläger's enthralling biography, based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting. He was as obsessional in his love affairs as in his love of nature, and changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the centre of his life changed. His work also responded intensely to outside cataclysms - the Dreyfus Affair, the First World War. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was his closest friend. Rich intellectual currents connected him to writers from Zola to Proust; affection and rivalry to Renoir, Pissarro and Manet. 
 
Monet said he was driven 'wild with the need to put down what I experience'. This rich and moving biography immerses us in that passionate experience, transforming our understanding of the man, his paintings and the fullness of his achievement.

Jackie Wullschläger

Praise for Monet

Jackie Wullschläger's magisterial and utterly engrossing biography of Monet is a tour de force. Many of us know the painter but this beautifully written and meticulously researched book brings alive Monet as a man, ...

Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschläger's pages is vulnerable, relentless, complex, believable. He has found a biographer who cares deeply for painting, and who tells his life-s ...

Jackie Wullschläger brings Monet to life with thrilling immediacy as he moves via a series of terrifying leaps into the unknown from nineteenth-century naturalism into Impressionism and ends up, after a long and ast ...

Jackie Wullschläger's magisterial and utterly engrossing biography of Monet is a tour de force. Many of us know the painter but this beautifully written and meticulously researched book brings alive Monet as a man, ...

Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschläger's pages is vulnerable, relentless, complex, believable. He has found a biographer who cares deeply for painting, and who tells his life-s ...

Jackie Wullschläger brings Monet to life with thrilling immediacy as he moves via a series of terrifying leaps into the unknown from nineteenth-century naturalism into Impressionism and ends up, after a long and ast ...

Jackie Wullschläger's magisterial and utterly engrossing biography of Monet is a tour de force. Many of us know the painter but this beautifully written and meticulously researched book brings alive Monet as a man, ...

Monet is in luck, and so are we. The man who emerges from Jackie Wullschläger's pages is vulnerable, relentless, complex, believable. He has found a biographer who cares deeply for painting, and who tells his life-s ...

Jackie Wullschläger brings Monet to life with thrilling immediacy as he moves via a series of terrifying leaps into the unknown from nineteenth-century naturalism into Impressionism and ends up, after a long and ast ...

Books by Jackie Wullschläger

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