
The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Sue Roe
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.
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About Sue Roe
Reviews for The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Jane Stevenson
Daily Telegraph
Roe is good at bounding from one eye-catching anecdote to another
Martin Grayford
Sunday Telegraph
The great strength of Roe's book is the way that it manages to synthesise the wealth of published biographical and scholarly work on half a dozen artists into a coherent narrative of kith and kinship
Kathryn Hughes
Guardian
Her book is widely researched but has a neat, light touch
Independent on Sunday