The Impressionists at Home

A celebration of domesticity and the daily life of the world's best-loved artists, filled with paintings, sketches, photographs, and quotations from diaries and letters.

Impressionist artists and their homes are inseparably linked: Monet and Giverny, Renoir and Les Cagnes, Pissarro and his Hermitage. For each, home meant something slightly different: a place of comfort in a rapidly evolving society, a sanctuary immune to changing fortune and fame, a simpler way of life away from the city, or a place to entertain and to express individual taste. All of the artists, however, made their homes a mainstay of their art.

Through this book we follow the artists' daily activities and routines—working, dining, bathing, socializing, sleeping—and come ever closer to the extraordinary characters behind the paintings. Here are Berthe Morisot's conversations with her cook; Degas' relationship with his devoted housekeeper; Monet's highly unconventional ménage with his second wife; the lingering mood of pleasure at the end of a good meal, as reflected in Renoir's Boatmen's Lunch. The reader witnesses the birth of the modern world, with its telephones and central heating, and explores the relationships between the artists and their models, mistresses, wives, friends, families, patrons, dealers, doctors, gardeners, and children.

The extended Impressionist family includes the American "Givernistes" who gathered around Monet in his later life and Impressionist artists from other countries. All find their place, and the book is completed by biographies of the supporting characters and the locations of Impressionist homes for today's travelers. 180 illustrations in color and black and white.