Few movements have transformed the way we see the world quite like Impressionism. As major exhibitions continue to celebrate the movement, from the National Gallery's Renoir exhibition to the Royal Academy's Painting the French Riviera and the forthcoming Monet exhibition at Tate Modern, interest in these pioneering artists remains as strong today as it was in the nineteenth century. With their luminous colour, expressive brushstrokes and fascination with fleeting moments, the Impressionists captured modern life in all its vitality, changing the course of art history in the process.
Whether you're discovering Impressionism for the first time or looking to deepen your understanding of its leading figures, these books offer fresh perspectives on the artists, ideas and landscapes that defined the movement. Explore Claude Monet through his personal correspondence, travel alongside him in search of new light and inspiration, delve into Renoir's complex life, and uncover the remarkable draughtsmanship of Degas and his contemporaries. From intimate biographies and artists' letters to beautifully illustrated surveys and focused studies, this reading list reveals the stories behind some of the most beloved works in Western art.
1. Claude Monet: A Life in Letters
In almost every letter, like the sun breaking through the fog, come glimpses of Monet the painter: alive to light, enthralled by landscape, thrilled by the sky above and the water below – The Times
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.
Published to mark the centenary of the artist’s death, this is a fresh opportunity to explore the life and letters of the ‘father of Impressionism’ in his own words.
Discover Claude Monet: A Life in Letters by Teresa Krasny, Frances Fowle, Flavie Durand-Ruel Mouraux, Karen Serres and Sylvie Patry
2. Impressionism (Art Essentials)
A broad, informative, well-illustrated and international view of Impressionism – Barbara Ehrlich White, author of Renoir: An Intimate Biography
It is often forgotten just how provocative Impressionist canvases seemed when they were first exhibited in 1874. The advocates of the new style rejected the established principles of art prevalent at that time in France.
Daringly using colour and rapid brushstrokes, the Impressionists worked out of doors, creating paintings that captured the transient effects of light and feeling. Ralph Skea shows how Impressionist artists transformed everyday subject matter, and traces the movement from its origins in France to its spread to America and Australia.
Discover Impressionism (Art Essentials) by Ralph Skea
3. In the Gardens of Impressionism
Pleases both the mind and eye with intelligent new analysis of a beloved Impressionist subject –The Royal Academy Magazine
In the Gardens of Impressionism explores the Impressionists’ fascination with gardens, parks and flowers in the context of the contemporary craze for horticulture and the changing political and cultural landscape in France. It discusses the artists both as painters and as gardeners, and, using source material such as contemporary gardening manuals, offers exciting new interpretations of their art.
With its insights about familiar works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet and Pissarro, thorough coverage of less familiar Impressionists such as Bazille, Caillebotte and Guillaumin, and spectacular illustrations, including period photographs, engravings from journals and cartoons, as well as paintings and drawings, this book will appeal equally to the scholar, student, art lover or gardening enthusiast.
Discover In the Gardens of Impressionism by Clare A. P. Willsdon
4. Monet Abroad
Claude Monet was a lifelong traveller. For more than fifty years, he made his way through Europe, looking for remarkable scenes, reflections, nuances and transparencies of light to capture through his painting – the result of patient, obsessive observation. From Normandy to Venice, via London, Brittany, the Mediterranean and the banks of the Seine, his travels were far more than mere journeys: they were an incessant quest for visual sensations. Florence Gentner retraces his artistic and personal trajectory, showing how twenty destinations profoundly influenced some 250 of his major works, as well as the evolution of his palette.
Extracts from more than 100 letters, numerous sketches, notebook excerpts and reproductions reveal the circumstances of his journeys and convey the painter’s state of mind while he was away from home. His travel paintings constitute an exceptional body of work, enriched, for each trip, by an insightful analysis from Marine Kiesel.
Part artistic biography, part travelogue, and presented in a beautiful printed cloth hardcover binding, Monet Abroad reveals the modernity and insatiable curiosity of a painter constantly in search of new horizons and new subjects.
Discover Monet Abroad by Florence Gentner
5. Renoir: An Intimate Biography
The most personal account of any Impressionist ever written … an unmissable, revelatory account – Financial Times
The joy that permeates Auguste Renoir’s paintings was created by a complicated person, whom even close friends and family members struggled to understand. The world’s leading authority on Renoir’s life and work here presents an intimate biography of this most intriguing of Impressionist artists in a narrative interspersed with over a thousand extracts from letters by, to and about Renoir. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Barbara Ehrlich White brings us into direct contact with Renoir as an artist, friend and father, and enables us to appreciate more fully his great paintings.
It was in the face of great obstacles that Renoir became hugely popular: thirty years of poverty followed by thirty years of progressive paralysis of his fingers. Close friendship with scores of people who helped him with money, contacts and companionship enabled him to overcome these challenges to create more than 4,000 optimistic, life-affirming paintings. The author brings a lifetime of research to bear in her biography to challenge misconceptions around Renoir’s reputation, providing an unparalleled portrait of this multi-faceted and contradictory artist through his own words and those of his friends.
Discover Renoir: An Intimate Biography by Barbara Ehrlich White, available in hardback or paperback.
6. Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels
Edgar Degas was described as ‘the most intelligent, the most demanding, the most merciless draughtsman in the world’ by the poet and critic Paul Valery and today Degas is considered one of the outstanding draughtsman of the late 19th century. His powerful drawings and the pastels, which he himself characterized as ‘orgies of colour’, are some of the most compelling works in western art.
Drawing was not only the central tenet of Degas’s art but also virtually a daily activity. Through an examination of the artist’s drawings and pastels, which exist in great number and variety, Christopher Lloyd examines the development of Degas's style and outlines the story of his life in the contexts of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Following a broadly chronological approach, Lloyd discusses the wide range of Degas’s work: the images of ballet dancers (which form over half of the artist’s oeuvre), jockeys, laundresses, milliners and female nudes, as well as the less well-known landscape drawings. With over 200 illustrations that capture the most fleeting of subtleties and shades, this book provides a comprehensive and engaging account of the artist as draughtsman.
Discover Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels by Christopher Lloyd
7.World of Art Books
Linda Nochlin on Impressionism (World of Art)
For generations, Thames & Hudson’s celebrated World of Art series has provided some of the most accessible and insightful introductions to art history. For readers looking to explore Impressionism in greater depth, the series offers a rich range of titles covering both the movement as a whole and many of its most influential artists.
Belinda Thomson's Impressionism brings together the latest scholarship to examine the artistic, social and cultural forces that shaped the movement, while Bernard Denvir’s The Impressionists at First Hand reveals the movement through the artists’ own words, contemporary criticism and personal reminiscences. Readers seeking focused studies can also turn to dedicated volumes on key figures including Monet, and Mary Cassatt. Combining authoritative research, thoughtful analysis and accessible writing, these books offer an ideal starting point for anyone wishing to understand the artists who revolutionized modern painting.
Discover the World of Art series
8. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings
Manet, Pissarro, Morisot, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and their colleagues made some of the most beautiful drawings in the history of art. This book sets drawings by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the context of late 19th-century France and explains why these particular works are as important as their paintings in the representation of modernity.
A new approach to materials and a wholly inclusive attitude to exhibitions gave drawings a more elevated status in this period than ever before, which avant-garde artists welcomed in their preference for scenes from contemporary life. For the first time also, painting and drawing shared the same stylistic principles of spontaneity, freer handling and lack of finish. Pastels by Degas, watercolours by Cézanne, pen-and-ink drawings by Van Gogh and mixed media works by Toulouse-Lautrec have an autonomy of their own, which proved instrumental in the development of modern art.
The distinguished art historian Christopher Lloyd examines the drawings of twenty of the leading Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, highlighting an aspect of French avant-garde art that remains relatively unexplored and was of immense importance for the art movements that followed.
Discover Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings by Christopher Lloyd
9. Monet's Trees: Paintings and Drawings by Claude Monet
‘I perhaps owe it to flowers’, wrote Claude Monet (1840–1926), ‘that I became a painter.’ One of the leading figures of the Impressionist movement and perhaps the most celebrated landscape painter of his age, Monet dedicated his life to capturing the subtleties of the natural world. Trees – willows enveloped in the mists of the Seine, palm trees beneath the Mediterranean sun or poplars heavily laden with snow – became a significant motif in his work, and he used them to experiment with an extraordinary variety of tones and colours.
Ralph Skea’s account focuses on five different themes: Monet’s earliest drawings and paintings of trees; his atmospheric use of rivers and coastlines, from the English Channel to the Italian Riviera; the fields, farmlands and orchards of France; parks and gardens in both the city and the countryside, including his series of paintings featuring trees reflected in his water-lily pond; and his muted depictions of trees in winter. The result is a succinct and highly accessible exploration of some of the best-loved landscapes in art.
Discover Monet's Trees: Paintings and Drawings by Claude Monet by Ralph Skea
