Rubin Henry

How to Read an Impressionist Painting is a new, original exploration of the hugely popular and revolutionary 19th-century art movement. James Rubin organizes his discussion by subject matter, rather than by artist, looking at urban views and city life, interiors and still life, family and friends, and other common themes. By avoiding an artist-based structure, and without the convention of a chronological approach, he provides readers with the tools to think critically and analytically about Impressionism as a movement, and offers a new understanding of the collective momentum that drove the artists to work with such originality and commitment to modern themes and pictorial originality.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the most admired and famous painters of all time, and the architect of Impressionism: a revolution that gave birth to modern art. His technique - painting out of doors, at the seashore or in the city streets - was as radically new as his subject matter, the landscapes and middle-class pastimes of a newly industrialized Paris. Painting with an unprecedented immediacy and authenticity, Monet claimed that his work was something new: both natural and true. In this new introductory study, James H. Rubin - one of the world's foremost specialists in 19th-century French art - traces the development of Monet's practice, from his early work as a caricaturist to the late paintings of waterlilies and his garden at Giverny. Rubin explores the cultural currents that helped to shape Monet's work: the utopian thought that gave rise to his politics; his interest in Japanese prints, gardening, and trends in the decorative arts; and his relationship with earlier French landscape painters as well as such contemporaries as Manet and Renoir.