Claude Monet was not only the creator of what we now view as French
Impressionist painting, he was also its last major practitioner. By
the time he passed away in 1926, he had outlived all the other
painters--Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, and the others whom we
now group together under that heading. Yet when Andre Suares, one
of the four directors--along with Gide, Valery, and Claudel--of the
influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, summed up the movement that
year, he did not give Monet pride of place. Rather, he wrote, ""Far
more than Sisley, Claude Monet, or the Goncourt brothers, Loti was
the great Impressionist."" As this shows, that Pierre Loti, the
once world-renowned French novelist, developed a remarkably
Impressionist style was recognised early on. It continues to be
acknowledged in France today. Franck Ferrand, a contemporary
historian known for his appearances on French radio and television,
recently wrote that ""Pierre Loti [is] the only truly impressionist
writer of French literature."" Yet while those who know his work in
France continue to see him as an Impressionist artist on the level
of Monet and Renoir, no one has ever asked how he achieved this in
literature, how he went about creating novels that resembled the
work of Monet. That is the subject of this book. Examining certain
of Loti's important novels, this study shows how he managed to
reproduce with words what Monet was doing in oils. It also shows
how the author came to theorise about the effects of Impressionism
on the reader-viewer. Finally, it demonstrates how and why, in one
of his last novels, Loti undertook to reproduce the style of one of
the painters most admired by Monet: Rembrandt van Rijn, whom the
nineteenth-century French rediscovered in part because they could
present his sketchy biography as a demonstration of many of the
things liberal art historians and painters believed the ideal
artist should be.
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