Kirjahaku

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 André Suarès, one of the four directors--along with Gide, Valéry, 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.

Few authors have led lives as interesting as the French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923) - nor have they worked harder to make it appear even more romantic than it already was. As a career officer in the French navy, Loti participated in expeditions that took him to places that even today seem exotic to Westerners. For four decades he published a series of novels, travelogues and autobiographical narratives, some of which went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages around the world. With financial and artistic success came notoriety, which Loti delighted in enhancing by staging elaborate costume balls - to which he invited the photographic press. He was also sought out by some of the artistically inclined royalty of the day, including Princess Alice of Monaco and Queen Elizabeth of Romania, and the beloved actress Sarah Bernhardt had him write plays for her. The parties and titled nobility hurt his standing as a serious author in his last years, but they take nothing away from the best work of an artist whom Henry James hailed as a `remarkable genius'. Willa Cather confessed that she 'would swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in her work'. The extravagances of his often very public private life make his biography as astonishing as his art.