Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell
A book review
Claude and Camille is about artist Claude-Oscar Monet from age seventeen when he meets his mentor, artist Eugène Boudin, to the death of his first wife. Two love stories entwine, and the story of the painter in love with painting sometimes overshadows that of the man in love with a woman, as likely happened with the real Monet. Interludes set thirty years after her death feature him reflecting back on his relationship with the beautiful Camille as he struggles with his waterlily series.
Nineteenth-century Paris loved art (even if it thought artists disreputable), so a successful artist could make a living. The Impressionists, though, were greeted with a profound lack of interest. Claude continually assures Camille that "things will change for me," but only his belief in himself and the assurances of his friends that his work is good offer any hope of this. Gallery owners tell him potential buyers think his paintings look unfinished. "They don't want to hang sketches on their walls."
Both Claude's father and Camille's parents refuse to support them. His father urges him to return to Le Havre and work in the family's marine supply shop. Camille's family urges her to leave him and marry a respectable professional. So they live in a poverty lightened only by their love, the companionship of Claude's similarly impoverished artist friends, and the occasional prize or sale for one of his paintings.
Impressionists were known for painting outdoors - en plein air. Love scenes with both woman and canvas are most vivid when Claude is outdoors, or nearly so. "They climbed down to the west sand, where he pulled her steadily toward a rough little windowless shack ... " Painting in a rainstorm: "He opened his large umbrella and held it more over the easel and the empty canvas than himself.... The flowers and the shadows and the air moved against his brush; they moved from all about him to the canvas." (2010; 338 pages, including Historical Notes and a list of paintings mentioned in the novel)
Ironically, with a PhD in art history (ca. French Revolution to WWII), I shy away from novels on artists, as it's hard to set aside specific knowledge I may have, but your lovely precis has captured me. Monet has been denigrated as "just an eye--but what an eye!" and I am curious to imagine how that may have influenced into his emotional life. I generally look at sociopolitical context, so this will be something new for me. Thank you!
Thank you for this lovely comment. Yes, many novels about artists seem shallow. I think it must be hard to write good fiction about artists (I haven't tried it myself), because making art is such a non-verbal process, and often non-rational, coming from a place that can't easily be described in words. So a lot of novels about artists, it seems, focus primarily on their love-lives or on their economic difficulties. This one, I thought, put a priority on getting at the emotional meaning of how Monet created art, entwined with his love for his wife (and of course, the effect on both of them of their economic struggles).