Book description
Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe
Morisot and Mary Cassatt.
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries,
astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their
dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the world know the
Impressionists as people? In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer
Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes
of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron
Haussman's spectacular transformation.
For over twenty years they lived and worked together as a group,
struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian war and
supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar
canvasses depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossom and boating
scenes.
This intimate, colourful, superbly researched account takes us into
their homes as well as their studios and describes their
unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories
behind their paintings.
Sue Roe is a freelance writer and teacher. A former Lecturer at the
University of East Anglia and current lecturer at the University of
Sussex, she is the author of a novel,
Estella, Her Expectation
, a collection of poems,
The Spitfire Factory
, and
Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf's Writing Practice
. She is also co-editor of the
Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
, and her most recent book is the widely praised
Gwen John: A Life
. She lives in Brighton.
