Stephanie Cowell

WHAT FIRST INSPIRED THIS NOVEL?
I am the daughter of artists, and the stories of the struggles of the impressionists were told to me as bedtime stories when very little. My parents were always painting or drawing, and I walked by the jars of paint brushes with reverence as if they were alive. I also recall taking an apple from a fruit bowl one day, and my mother crying, “Don’t touch that, please! Your father’s painting it!” Well, that was alive too, it seemed! So I grew up going to museums and art shows.

The specific idea for this novel came when I visited an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1995 called “The Origins of Impressionism.” The curators had gathered paintings for it created by the young group of artists who would become the impressionists. They were mostly poor then; they slept on each other’s floors or painted the same vase of flowers side by side and stood “shoulder to shoulder” against the world as Renoir would later say. But I did not return to the book idea for some time; I was busy writing other things.


WHY DID YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT MONET’S YOUTH?
I think the formative years of a great artist are so very interesting. Everyone knows the old man in his water lily garden at Giverny but most people don’t know how he began, and how very handsome and sexy he was at twenty-five. He was very proud. At one point in his life he told his fellow art students, “I only sleep with duchesses and duchesses’ maids.” He was also very poor for a long time. He couldn’t afford a flower pot, much less a garden. He was drafted into the army and almost died and he kept getting thrown out of his rooms because he never could pay the rent. And then he was so immature in a way and only centered on his art, and he fell in love and eventually had to support a family on…less than nothing! At times he did not know if he could continue painting. So he had a sort of La Bohéme youth, the friendship, the struggles, the impossible love.


WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT CAMILLE-LEONIE DONCIEUX?
We know little about this young woman whom he loved so much. We have none of her letters; perhaps Monet did not choose to keep them for his own reasons, or maybe they were lost. I had to use a lot of creativity to portray her. We know she was full of fun and a good amateur actress and came from an upper-class family who were quite horrified at her living with this penniless, scrappy painter who wore lace cuffs! I felt she must have been a bit of a mystery, a complex young woman. She sometimes made up fantastical things about her life and he had no idea how to handle that. She was both difficult and extraordinarily supportive; she was full of secrets which are revealed as the book progresses. Claude Monet seldom painted people and hardly ever portraits but he painted and painted her. It was as if he could not get enough of her.

ARE YOU AN ARTIST YOURSELF?
Heavens, no! I come from a family of artists as I said, but the gift utterly passed me by. However, I see like an impressionist. I go quite wild over light and shadow and the changing colors of water.

WAS THE BOOK EASY OR DIFFICULT TO WRITE?
It was very difficult and took almost six years, during which time I pulled a lot of my hair out! (The previous novel took nine months and so I felt it was all quite unfair!) I think it was so difficult because I wanted to tell three stories at once: Monet’s discovering art and who he was, the journey of the motley group of obscure painters who are now known as impressionists; and then the story of his impulsive passionate love for the upper-class Camille, to whom he wanted to give every luxury and of course he had nothing to give, not even bread sometimes. It was very hard to tell those three stories in a moving plot line, to have them move together over about twenty years. There was war and exile also and death and birth and so much else.

I finally decided to write little interludes between the major sections when he is 68 years old, just before he exhibited his water lily paintings; he is writing Camille’s sister who is very angry at him. Camille had been dead thirty years then and he still had not really come to terms with her loss. He looks back. This technique helped frame and center the book. He keeps trying to reach out to the sister, saying, “What do you know about Camille that she never told me?” And meanwhile his first water lily show is coming close and he is increasingly anxious about rediscovering his lost love and the value of these very unique paintings. Sometimes he felt that everything he had failed in his work and life. He could get very depressed. I move back and forth from his old age to his youth in the novel.

WHEN DID MONET START PAINTING?
He was seventeen, and already making a fortune doing these silly, clever caricatures of everyone in his home town of Le Havre in Normandy. He was skipping school and lying to his father who wanted him to come into the family business. A local painter, Boudin, persuaded him to try landscapes and Monet turned his back on the business and caricatures forever.

HOW LONG DID IT TAKE FOR MONET TO BEGIN TO MAKE A STEADY IN-COME?
I think he began to find some secure footing when he was fifty. That’s a long time to live with financial insecurity. When he was about forty-three he rented Giverny; he could not afford to buy it until several years later.

WHAT ABOUT HIS OTHER FRIENDS? HOW DO THEY COME INTO THE NOVEL?
The young Monet shared studio space with his close friends; he first rents a studio with his friend the artist/​medical student Frédéric Bazille who plays a critical part in the story and pretty much saves Monet’s life and then later there is a terrible tragedy between them. As soon as they have a studio several others pretty much move in, sleeping on the floor, leaving their dirty socks everywhere and half-finished paintings. The dishes are hardly washed. Auguste Renoir is making money painting pretty women on the walls of Paris cafés (all lost now), Camille Pissarro is running between his day job decorating blinds and his early paintings of the countryside, many of which he will lose. Paul Cézanne is there and several others. Years before their first independent exhibition together, they are trying to get people to take their work seriously. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, everything changes for everyone.

HOW DID YOU DO THE RESEARCH?
Oh my, well I must have bought at least fifty books about Monet and the impressionists, maybe even seventy-five. I am still tripping over them! I learned a little French for the research. I really bought a lot. I went to Paris and all the places he lived and of course I went to Giverny.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GARDENS AT GIVERNY WHEN MONET DIED?
Sadly, they fell apart for a long time. His son’s widow lived on, but she had no money or strength to keep up the gardens as he had left them. By the time Monet’s second son died in 1966, the gardens were in terrible shape. Rats overran them. The greenhouse panes and the windows in the house were reduced to shards after the bombings of World War II. Floors and ceiling beams had rotted away, a staircase collapsed. Three trees were even growing in the big studio.

The Giverny property was left to the Academie des Beaux-Arts and in 1977, Gérald van der Kemp was appointed Curator there. With the gardener André Devillers, he reconstructed the garden as Monet had created it, using the help of many gardeners. The new custodians expected only a modest number of visitors but, to their surprise, the numbers grew steadily until they now exceed a half million each year. I visited a few years ago and you almost expect the old painter to come from the house and grumble at all the visitors as he made his way down the path with his easel towards the water lily pond.