Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-18% $16.43$16.43
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.74$7.74
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: ZBK Wholesale
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
The Private Lives of the Impressionists Paperback – Illustrated, October 23, 2007
Purchase options and add-ons
New York Times Bestseller
“Anyone who has ever lost themselves in Monet’s color-saturated gardens or swooned over Degas’s dancers will enjoy this revealing group portrait of the artists who founded the Impressionist movement. . . . For the armchair dilettante, as well as the art-history student, this is lively, required reading.” — People
The first book to offer an intimate and lively biography of the world’s most popular group of artists, including Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt.
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people?
Sue Roe's colorful, lively, poignant, and superbly researched biography, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, follows an extraordinary group of artists into their Paris studios, down the rural lanes of Montmartre, and into the rowdy riverside bars of a city undergoing monumental change. Vivid and unforgettable, it casts a brilliant, revealing light on this unparalleled society of genius colleagues who lived and worked together for twenty years and transformed the art world forever with their breathtaking depictions of ordinary life.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateOctober 23, 2007
- Dimensions6 x 0.92 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100060545593
- ISBN-13978-0060545598
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Anyone who has ever lost themselves in Monet’s color-saturated gardens or swooned over Degas’s dancers will enjoy this revealing group portrait of the artists who founded the Impressionist movement….for the armchair dilettante, as well as the art-history student, this is lively, required reading.” — People
“Exceptionally detailed and thoroughly researched….Roe has done an admirable job of unearthing…countless…source materials.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“The pleasure in reading Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists comes from forgetting the ways in which we usually think of these artists…What stands out finally is the perseverance of these artists; amid all the pressures, they kept learning from and inspiring one another.” — Boston Globe
“THE PRIVATE LIVES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS belongs not on the cocktail table…but on the bookshelf…a wonderful read, emotionally stirring and beautifully written.” — Christian Science Monitor
“The title suggests titillation and does not disappoint...Intelligent and well-crafted portraits of some of history’s most intriguing geniuses.” — Kirkus Starred Review
“Roe constructs a penetrating group portrait...scintillatingly detailed and empathic.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Meticulously researched and vividly written...a comprehensive and revealing group portrait.” — Publishers Weekly
“An entertaining, informative read...this [is a] wonderfully written biography.” — The Bookseller
“Charming… a decidedly readable work that should engage lay readers and spur undergraduates to conduct authentic research of their own.” — Library Journal
“A compelling subject: Sue Roe’s book does it justice and is a pleasure to read.” — Henrietta Garnett, Literary Review
“An illuminating insight into the lives of aesthetic revolutionaries” — Daily Telegraph (London)
“Vivid, superbly researched...Sue Roe transports us back to their Paris” — Daily Mail (London)
“Roe synthesizes the welath of published...work on half a dozen artists into a coherent narrative of kith and kinship” — Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
“Widely researched...[Roe] has a neat, light touch.” — Tom Rosenthal, Independent on Sunday
“Wonderful…Roe has a lively writing style and does a good job of delineating the personalities of each artist.” — Providence Journal
From the Back Cover
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people?
Sue Roe's colorful, lively, poignant, and superbly researched biography, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, follows an extraordinary group of artists into their Paris studios, down the rural lanes of Montmartre, and into the rowdy riverside bars of a city undergoing monumental change. Vivid and unforgettable, it casts a brilliant, revealing light on this unparalleled society of genius colleagues who lived and worked together for twenty years and transformed the art world forever with their breathtaking depictions of ordinary life.
About the Author
Sue Roe is the author of several books, including a widely praised biography of the artist Gwen John. She lives and teaches in Brighton, England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Private Lives of the Impressionists
By Sue RoeHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Sue RoeAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060545598
Chapter One
Napoleon III's Paris
'The Seine. I have painted it all my life, at all hours of the day, at all times of the year, from Paris to the sea . . . Argenteuil, Poissy, Vétheuil, Giverny, Rouen, Le Havre.'
—Claude Monet
The Seine flowed through its narrow bed, meandering from Paris to the Normandy coast, drawing all the countryside between into one region. 'Le Havre, Rouen and Paris are a single city, in which the Seine is a winding road,' Napoleon III, Emperor of France, was fond of saying. In Paris, along its banks, rows of irregular-shaped houses made a low, untidy skyline. On the Île Saint-Louis, large, old houses with balconies and balustrades lined the narrow road skirting the river. On the Left Bank, the horizon was wide open as far as the blue slate gables of the hôtel de ville; on the right bank you could see as far as the lead-covered dome of Saint Paul's. The Seine was a working river, its surface a clutter of colour, alive with cargo. Emile Zola later described it, in his novel L'Oeuvre: 'a dormant flotilla of skiffs and dinghies, . . . barges loaded with coal lighters . . . flat river barges were moored four deep along the Mail. Piled high with yellow apples, they made a blaze of gold.'
Early in 1860, Claude Monet—twenty, clean-shaven and handsome, with brown, appraising eyes and floppy dark hair—made his way along the Right Bank, to a ramshackle building next to the Palais de Justice, at the angle of the Boulevard de Paris and the quai des Orfèvres. Outside, suspended from the upper floors of the building, swung a huge, rusty sign: SABRA, Dentiste du Peuple. The building where the dentist pulled teeth at one franc apiece also housed the studio of 'Père' Suisse, a former artist's model of uncertain origins who twice daily opened his doors so that students could, for a fee of ten francs a month, sketch from his model. By February 1860, Monet had begun life as an art student in Paris, attending Suisse's studio every day.
In 1860, Paris was still a medieval city, with dark, mouldering, rat-infested streets, and no efficient sewage system. The jumble of crumbling buildings, and the absence of air and sunlight, trapped all the smells of decay and detritus that people still lived among. Household waste ran in indentations down the middle of the grimy cobbled streets. The poor lived in filthy, broken shacks and shanties clustered around Clichy, Mouffetard and the Louvre. Balzac had called all these the Louvre's 'leprous façades'. Napoleon III himself, who in 1830 had thrown out the republicans and restored the Empire, called Paris 'nothing but a vast ruin, with plenty to suit the rats'. But in 1853, Baron Haussmann had been elected Prefect of the Seine. He immediately began making plans to transform the city. On 1 January 1859, Napoleon signed a decree approving the Baron's plans to tear down the inner city wall. Former suburbs of Paris—including Auteuil, Belleville and Montmartre—now became part of the city. But the suburbs were still comparatively rural, especially Montmartre, which in 1859 was a muddle of houses with gardens, broken-down shacks, and cheap little run-down bars and crémeries. The country lanes of Montmartre housed the poor workers employed by the seamstresses, florists and laundresses who worked at the foot of the hillside in Pigalle. This was also the district—lively with cafés, brasseries and café-concerts (cabarets)—where the artists congregated. They gathered in the Café de Bade, Tortini's or the Moulin Rouge, where among chilled pitchers brimming with pink champagne, grimy young men were surrounded by women in brash, red lipstick and cheap crinolines.
The rich were ferried in horse-drawn carriages down the newly created Boulevard Haussmann to the Opéra in Pigalle's rue le Peletier, the women decked out in silk-embroidered crinolines, feathers and pearls. But not just the rich: everyone was on the move. In 1855, the Universal Exhibition—a vast, commercial fair, designed to demonstrate to the world Paris's prosperity, and to show off its decorative arts and material culture—had introduced new fashions and set new precedents in taste. The Emperor's musical soirées, held in the gardens of the Château of the Tuileries, set the sartorial tone. The audiences comprised a mingling of the haute bourgeoisie with newly affluent members of the upwardly mobile merchant and industrial classes who were moving into Haussmann's new apartments and buying chic, new mass-produced ornaments and furniture. Since 1857, 300 newly acquired horse-drawn omnibuses had been circulating among neighbouring boulevards (not simply, as they once had, servicing the more profitable routes). For the first time, Parisians could move easily through the city for shopping and entertainment, although the top deck was barred to women, for fear of their showing their ankles as they mounted the stairs. Haussmann was laying down new streets, pulling down whole districts, and creating new squares. Some said Haussmann's Paris was designed for the easy surveillance of approaching armies; others, that it was really contrived to drive the poor of Paris away from the central arrondissements, out to the suburbs. As the construction took place, and the industrial and commercial classes began to purchase smart new apartments, there was increased potential for extravagance, commerce and the pursuit of pleasure, and an obsession with clothes and decoration. The city was in a state of flux. There was a new sense of bustle and movement, and, for the first time, a mix of people of all classes in the streets, which smelled unmistakably of Paris: a mingling of leeks and lilacs. When the bulldozers arrived and began their clearing-up operation to remove the workers' shacks and create the rue de Rivoli, the rag-pickers came in: tramps and absinthe drinkers, poking about among the debris for the coins and jewellery rumoured to be buried there.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Private Lives of the Impressionistsby Sue Roe Copyright © 2007 by Sue Roe. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (October 23, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060545593
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060545598
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.92 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #78,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
These artists struggled for the majority of their lives due to an unflinching dedication to their art.Though they were mocked by the public and struck down by critics again and again,they refused to conform and abandon their vision.Now,more than a hundred years later,people of all ages stand in awe in museums all over the world admiring their colorful landscapes,crowded city streets and beautiful women.Their depictions of everyday life and nature at it's most striking is what make their work timeless.
The book is very accessible,it's written more as a story rather than a stale and flat biography.Roe succeeds at giving the reader an idea of the poltical and economic conditions the artists had to deal with.There are a great deal of characters in this book and Roe does a flawless job of focusing on each artist and giving more emphasis on certain ones when needed.
Fantastic read,highly recommended for art lovers of any age and caliber.
The book is meticulously detailed and well documented. Want to know Renoir's address in the summer of 1876? It's probably in there. The upside of all this detail is that we a very good idea of biography. The downside is that the book can drag at times, having been edited more as a timeline than a dramatic narrative account that focuses mostly on pivotal points in the artists' lives.
It seems almost presumptive that you're already very familiar with the art of the Impressionists. There are only a couple small illustrations for each artist discussed, so if you're looking for lots of lush photographic representations of artwork, this isn't the book for you. There's some discussion of how the Impressionists differed from the dominant salon painters, but overall the book is very light on art theory, comparative criticism, discussion of technique, and art history (at least in context to what came before and after).
If you're new to the Impressionists and their work, it's probably better to start with a more richly illustrated work that places the artists in a historical context. If you're already very familiar with the works of the Impressionists, this is a great place to learn more about the lives they lived and the world in which they painted.
I've read many art history books (plus earned art degrees). My fave books, exhibition and auction catalogs give insights into the inner lives and goals of the artists as artists. I still don't know much about their inner creative lives.
I don't know what discussions they held with each other, arguing and enlightening each other about their artistic challenges and journeys. I want and need to know more about that, rather than merely their economic and personal, romantic, family lives. Hence, I upgraded only to 3 stars.
Original review:
I am really sorry to give one star, my first. I could not believe how many obscure English words I read, plus words in French! WHO is this written for? People with a PhD in Art History, minor in English?
Most people read at 8th grade level. I read at graduate level. I earned BA in Art and MFA in Design. I have 12 years of college, plus teaching for 10. I also have read hundreds of bios and art history books.
I don't know if I should keep this book. I was so excited to finally order it, due to being my birthday. But wow, I hope it gets better.
I kept looking at the old maps at the front of book, to find areas she mentioned at the very start of the book. I couldn't find most of them! If you are going to detail where people lived, studied and gathered, give us better maps!
Wassup with so many words which went over my very educated mind? I'm disappointed.
Yes, I've learned a bit. But the bitter taste of taking so long to look at the 2 maps and wondering what I'm missing due to not understanding all she wrote really makes me sad.
I just finished three books about major movies (Sunset Blvd and All About Eve) and a Sondheim musical, Follies, which I saw during first LA run. No problem understanding one single word. And those were not lightweight books! Follies written by the man who ran the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization for years. VERY literate books.
WHY can't reading about art being entertaining and not require a dictionary? :-(