Customer Reviews

Great Masters of Art: Monet: A Retrospective

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I saw this book in my local bookstore and immediatly snatched it up! It got a TON of paintings done by Monet, most of them in color. Though the actual biography about him is slim, the articles by past painters, colleagues, and friends are wonderful. Be warned: It's a heafty book, but undoubtedly delightful!!

The book opens with a chronology of about 15 pages and a short introduction. The remainder of the text comprises a vast array of contemporary reports and commentaries on Monet from news media and other sources by a numerous writers. These do make fascinating reading; the wide range of writers includes among others critics, philosophers and statesmen, and among these are some notable names such as Proust, Maupassant and Zola; the comments range from ridicule to praise. They run according the publishers, chronologically from 1865, but that is a very loose description for the sequence is far from consecutive. Usefully reference to colour plates is provided in the margin alongside the relevant text. The book includes an index.

It is illustrated throughout with 132 colour plates and 119 monochromes. The colour reproduction generally is acceptable, but there are a number of images that are noticeably dark with little detail evident in the darkest areas. The monochrome images are not so good; typical of poor quality offset-litho the images are too dark with large areas of solid black entirely lacking detail. The colour plates each occupy a page, although due to the book format some paintings may occupy no more than half the page. This problem has been overcome with a few of the very wide Water Lily paintings by employing fold out pages. A very wide range of Monet's work is covered.

Overall production does not impress, the presentation in some sections is crude, and it is badly let down by the quality of the monochrome images. It is a big and heavy book, and the large format does allow for many of Monet's paintings to be reproduced to a reasonable size; it is worth having for the colour reproductions and the interesting text.

13.25" x 9.75" (33.6 cm x 24.7 cm) Published 1985 ISBN 0883633019 Hardback

Enjoy Monet's greatest works with over 100 full-color plates. In addition to the vivid plates the text is overflowing with wonderful descriptions of his life and work.

This book came water damaged from the supplier. It is ok but not to the level that I expected.It did not have several of the paintings that I was looking for such as the irises which is world famous. Also it did not have the painting showing the red boats in the harbour, another famous painting. I did order another book on Monet's gardens which was considerably better.

This is a large, heavy and durable book that brings you a great portrayal of Claude Monet, with wonderful pictures both in color and black and white, along with interesting and intimate commentary about his life during the time he created his paintings. One of the full color pictures is of "Green Reflections" where the picture is over 27 feet (847 cm) long.

The back of the book has an in depth index of paintings, colleagues, associations, museums, and the names of Monet's paintings.

Highly Recommended for impressionist art lovers. Barbara Rose, author of, `Individual Power' and `If God Was Like Man'