IMPRESSION SUNRISE

Joaquim presents a biographical novel about the brilliant French painter Claude Monet and his second wife, Alice.

This sweeping, generous narrative takes its title from the Monet’s famous contribution to a groundbreaking 1874 group show in Paris in which he and a group of well-known colleagues, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas, introduced the world to impressionism. The author uses the long arc of Monet’s career, his many sales and exhibitions, as the backdrop to his personal life. Readers first meet Monet while he’s still with his first wife, Camille, and they meet Alice when she’s married to businessman and art collector Ernest Hoschede. Joaquim fills chapters with details of the Hoschede family’s life, and the slow progression of Monet as he moves from penury and obscurity to fame, while also including controlled digressions about his contemporaries: “Their respect and affection for one another went unspoken, but it was all there, manifested in a friendly glance, a knowing smile, a reluctant nod, a familiar chuckle.” The narrative becomes more tense and emotional when, in the wake of Camille’s death, Alice leaves her spouse to live with Monet and begins brashly and affectionately speaking of him in public, “the way a woman talks about the man she cares about most in the world, the man who is her lover and confidant.” Sometimes the author’s prose can feel overcooked (“Overwhelmed and completely caught off guard, in an explosive flash of time, like a paper doll crushed and twisted by a reckless hand, she crumbled to the floor”). However, much of the work will very favorably remind readers of such excellent novels as Irving Stone’s Vincent Van Gogh-centered Lust for Life (1934), or Rembrandt (1961) by Gladys Schmitt.

A muscular, richly atmospheric novel of art and artists.