The first major English-language publication dedicated to Monet’s letters, expertly selected and richly illustrated with his paintings.
Claude Monet’s letters – to his friends, family, fellow artists, patrons and gallerists – offer an unmatched glimpse into the artist’s life, revealing his passions, anxieties and frank opinions, and expanding our view of his working life and practice. From his formative years to fame at the end of his life, this selection of letters is accompanied by profiles of his correspondents, expert introductions and comprehensive annotations. Illustrated with some of Monet’s best-known paintings, contemporary photographs and reproductions of some of the letters themselves, his world is revealed in words and images as never before.
This book explores the remarkable commercial and personal relationship between Paul Gauguin and Gustave Fayet, the collector and entrepreneur whose championing of Gauguin's work helped secure the artist's legacy.
By the time they began corresponding around 1900, Gauguin had rejected Western materialism and was living in self-imposed exile in French Polynesia, far from the Paris art world. Although he had used his experience as a collector to help market his own work, he struggled with third-party dealers and had yet to establish himself as a leading figure of the modern art movement. Fayet, meanwhile, was a collector and wine grower. What, then, drew the artist to a man so rooted in the South of France? Belinda Thomson presents a comparative biographical narrative that reveals the unique dynamic between the two, exploring the psychological motivations behind their relationship against the backdrop of emerging modernism at the end of the 19th century.
