The Impressionists at Home
Pamela Todd
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| ‘… this book cannot be beaten as an introduction to the real personalities behind the Impressionist movement’ | | – State of Art |
| ‘A compendium of lively biographical detail, social history and lesser-known works of considerable beauty … wholly beguiling’ | | – House & Garden |
| ‘… by giving her readers this intimate view … creates a genuine context for these equally intimate paintings of the pleasures of bourgeois life’ | | – RA Magazine |
Monet and Giverny, Renoir and Les Collettes, Pissarro and the Hermitage at Pontoise: Impressionist artists and their homes are inseparably linked. For each, ‘home’ meant something slightly different – a place of comfort in a rapidly shifting society, a sanctuary immune to changing fortunes and fame, a simpler way of life away from the city, a place to express their individuality and to entertain. In every case it shaped their art.
Organised around the artists’ daily routines – eating, socialising, working, bathing, sleeping, relaxing, raising children – The Impressionists at Home explores the family lives of the Impressionists as never before. Drawing on their paintings, diaries, letters, reminiscences, intimate sketches and family photographs, it charts the turbulence and tranquility of the artists’ private lives, considering their attitudes to relationships, family, interior decoration, money and their art.
Through warm and affectionate sketches the Impressionists are seen in a new light: Monet, after an impoverished start, settling into the comfortable existence of a bourgeois; Renoir, the flighty young artist, maturing into a loving family man; Pissarro, the committed Socialist, Toulouse-Lautrec, the distinguished aristocrat; Morisot, the stylish Parisienne.
The Impressionists at Home includes biographies of the main characters, including models, mistresses and servants, and a list of homes still open to the public.
Pamela Todd studied History of Art in the University of London, and has written a number of books on art between 1850 and 1920.
Also of interest
Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception
In the Gardens of Impressionism
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|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500512396 | | ISBN-13 978-0500512395 | | | | 27.0 x 25.0 cm | | Hardback | | 176pp | | 174 illustrations, 125 in colour | | First published 2005 | | | | £19.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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