“The Woman in the Green Dress” by Stephanie Cowell

This Droemer output by Stephanie Cowell’s novel “The woman in the green dress” has an extensive appendix that includes not only notes and thanks mainly an overview of the mentioned in the novel images with an indication of those formative years and the museums. If you read these pages in advance, so you have a useful perspective on the theme of the novel: the life of Claude Monet. The author has researched intensively and very tells the biography of the painter, his artistic career, his friends, the later “Impressionists”, and especially his love for Camille Doncieux, his first wife to reality.

The book’s title is that “the lady in the green dress” or simply “Camille” was chosen freely after a painting Monet from 1866 known by the titles “Camille in green dress”. The large-format portrait (231 times 151 cm, oil on canvas, on display in the Kunsthalle Bremen today) shows Camille Doncieux in green dress and jacket. The painter brought important recognition by the critics when he exhibited it in 1866 at the Paris Salon, and it is still considered outstanding work of his earlier works.

Camille was (1847-1879) Claude Monet (1840-1926) often model, for example of the “Luncheon on the Grass” and for the “Women in the Garden”. Even in death she was portrayed even by her husband.

To the content of the novel. Three decades after Camille’s death lives Monet when he was seventy in Giverny. He has rented a house and the dream of a garden, which has its charm in all seasons realized.

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He prefers to spend his time at a pond, where he creates his famous lily images with which he is almost never satisfied – even a multi-planned exhibition of his major gallery owners Paul Durand-Ruel, he shifts because of this several times. He writes letters to Annette, the sister of his favorite Camille, and ask them to letters that Camille once sent to an unknown person, because he wants to be finally explain some secrets from Camille’s past.

Each chapter provides the author a year and a striking statement ahead, such as Auguste Renoir’s “If God had created no female breasts, I do not know if I would have become a painter” (page 156). This is followed by the act in strict chronological order over the years. Beginning in 1857 is still alive Monet in Le Havre with his father. This has a grocery store and to go radically against Monet’s desire to Paris to study painting. He is penniless. Although it sends a little money his aunt, but he always has to appeal in cafes people, whether they are interested in a portrait for little money. He learns Frédéric Bazille know who will be his faithful and help richest friend, even in greatest need.

The circle is larger: In the schools of painting Monet Auguste Renoir, Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edouard Manet and other hits. All of them have never enough money, but go hungry rather than that they save on canvas and paint. They meet, paint together in a studio, often live in an apartment, preparing for important exhibitions. Camille will later say (free after the Musketeers, page 143): “Un pour tous, tous pour un” – founded but a community that makes an independent exhibition! Again and again they experience disappointment, because their pictures are not in demand. People love the prevailing taste of realism. It was late one is her painting “en pleine air” with the name “Impressionism” Connect – to express a concept that used a critic after an exhibition mocking his derogatory opinion Camille.

Later, his model, his mistress, his wife – looks Claude Monet for the first time at a train station, where they loudly discussed with her mother. Four years later he meets her by chance in a bookstore back to where she works for her sick uncle. Monet is their outright Greek classical beauty so infatuated that he asks her to be his model. In secret – because it comes from circles of the bourgeoisie – they visited him in his studio, and their mutual deep love is unstoppable.

As Camille draws against the will of their parents to the painter, she experienced the privations richest years of their lives. They are so poor that Claude gives her engagement to a braided from grass ring. But he promises her that she will live one day in a house with a garden. Long as they live together unmarried, itself comes as the first son. You will experience ups and downs – with dissonances Claude is to paint incapable and Camille is always emotionally disturbed – but without the other they can not live like two magnets, they attract each other During the German.

French War in 1870 they leave France and go to London. There learns Monet the gallery Durant-Ruel know who sells some of his images. For a while they feel a little better, but still the money is used up quickly, and they have to leave once again their stay hastily and take everything seizable. 1879 dies Camille at the age of 32 years. According to historical sources, an abortion was the cause, but the author has created for her novel a more agonizing death for them.

If you reduce this novel to the genre romance novel, it is for me among the very best, I have ever read. described sensitive, without a kitsch or Schnulz, we experience with how these two people fit together and overcome incredible hardship of times. In this case never forget their friends: your room – studio, bedroom and living room, all in one – is always open to all.

Stephanie Cowell describes the period atmosphere, the hard life of today such famous artists of the time and the historically true relationship between two people almost as did also a brush in his hand. So light, so colorful, so sunny, so airy, emotionally stressed to the changing light of sun and clouds, as “impressionistic” as the painting of her characters she puts her lines carefully. This novel is a praline historical novels for lovers, but also for art lovers who want to be entertained demanding.