Manet Paints Monet focuses on an auspicious moment in the history of art. In the summer of 1874, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Claude Monet (1840–1926), two outstanding painters of the nascent Impressionist movement, spent their holidays together in Argenteuil on the Seine River. Their growing friendship is expressed in their artwork, culminating in Manet’s marvelous portrait of Monet painting on a boat.
The boat was the ideal site for Monet to execute his new plein-air paintings, enabling him to depict nature, water, and the play of light. Similarly, Argenteuil was the perfect place for Manet, the great painter of contemporary life, to observe Parisian society at leisure. His portrait brings all the elements together—Manet’s own eye for the effect of social conventions and boredom on vacationers, and Monet’s eye for nature—but these qualities remain markedly distinct. With this book, esteemed art historian Willibald Sauerländer describes how Manet, in one instant, created a defining image of an entire epoch, capturing the artistic tendencies of the time in a masterpiece that is both graceful and profound.
Willibald Sauerländer was professor of art history at the University of Freiburg; director of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich; Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and visiting professor at many distinguished institutions. He is the author of, among others, The Catholic Rubens. David Dollenmayer is a prizewinning emeritus professor of German at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“As the distinguished German art historian Willibald Sauerländer recounts in Manet Paints Monet—a compact volume of sparkling insight and charm—the two artists and their families spent the summer of 1874 together in the riverside town of Argenteuil, just north of Paris, and there embarked on a storied adventure of artistic discovery. . . . This work is highly recommended.”
—Wall Street Journal
“An amuse-bouche of a book, a brief but illuminating discussion of a moment in time.”
—Publishers Weekly
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