Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (35 page)

HISTORICAL NOTES

T
HE IDEA FOR THIS NOVEL
came to me while attending an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1995 called “The Origins of Impressionism.” In it, the curators had gathered many paintings from the young artists who would eventually be famous. The artists were mostly poor then; they slept on one another’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. Of all the paintings in that exhibition, two haunted me more than the others. One was Claude Monet’s
The Point of the Hève at Low Tide
and the other the fast, rough painting by Frédéric Bazille of his friends in his studio. A small painting, it is a microcosm of a whole world. I was startled to read on a placard that Frédéric had died in the war just before he turned twenty-nine. Why had a young artist gone to war?

The novel is based on history; some events have been slightly altered or fictionalized for dramatic strength and continuity.

All the world knows Monet as an old man in his gardens at Giverny, but the genesis of that revered painter was a very determined and handsome young man: proud, sometimes haughty, and sometimes humble, in need of love and understanding and someone to buy his work. If he had not stood his ground through all his hardships with the help of those who loved him, there would be no water lily paintings today. I wanted readers to know him as he was to better understand what he became: where the determination came to paint his gardens year after year, still seeking deeper expressions of their beauty. I wanted to write about his great love for the girl whom he painted in a green promenade dress.

At the time I began to write the novel, I could find very little about Camille Doncieux. Late in my writing, I discovered parts of a recently discovered diary kept by a nineteenth-century art collector that revealed a little more about her charm, her amateur theatricals, and the good family from whom she ran away to throw her lot in with Claude Monet. As with many models for the great artists, little of her personal information remains. No single letter to or from her has been found. Claude adored her; he painted her more than he ever painted anyone else. She died young before he could give her the things he promised her. What complexity or trouble in their relationship caused him perhaps to turn to Alice Hoschedé? The ménage of the two women and eight children in his house toward the end of Camille’s short life caused considerable gossip in Paris at the time. Claude was wild with grief when Camille died. And he did marry Alice in the end.

Of the three major characters, Monet’s best friend, Frédéric Bazille, was perhaps the most complex. A few of his paintings suggest a possible sexuality that he himself did not understand. He was immensely fond of Camille, choosing to buy the picture of her as four women in a garden above all other paintings, but the conjecture of his intimate relationship with her and any other person grew from my imagination alone. The last twenty years have brought a retrospect of the work of this young painter and good friend.

The gardens of Giverny have a wonderful true history.

Four years after the death of Camille, Monet and Alice Hoschedé rented the Giverny house and moved there with their children. When Alice’s husband died, Monet married her. It was some time before he had enough money to actually buy the property and begin his gardens. These expanded over the years to include the great water gardens and famous water lilies. Alice’s daughter Blanche eventually married Monet’s son Jean.

At the age of sixty-nine, Monet gave his first exhibition of his water lily paintings. Still he continued to paint them. In his eighties, just before his death, he completed the great paintings of his gardens for the Paris Orangerie at the urging of the prime minister of France.

The grown children of both families had scattered but Blanche, now a widow and an accomplished painter herself, lived on in Giverny as the keeper of her stepfather’s memory. When Michel Monet also died in 1966, it was found that his father’s personal collection of his own work and that of his friends had been kept in the son’s country house, stuffed under beds, piled in the cellar, and in cupboards. The property at Giverny was in terrible condition. Rats overran the gardens. 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 had collapsed. Three trees were even growing in the big studio.

The paintings went to the Musée Marmottan in Paris. It took almost ten years to restore the gardens at Giverny to their former magnificence. Fortunately, Michel had made the Académie des Beaux-Arts heir to the property, and in 1977 Gérald van der Kemp was appointed curator. The gardener André Devillers helped him reconstruct the gardens as Monet had created them.

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. They come seeking the peace of the place that inspired the art—peace hard-won by the artist, who left the gardens as his last gift to the world. One of the Giverny guides writes a poetic journal in French of the daily world there; she has now also added selections in English. It can be found at
http://givernews.com
.

Frédéric is buried in Montpellier. Camille’s grave can be found in Vétheuil in the église Notre-Dame. Claude Monet is buried on the grounds of the église Sainte-Radegonde a little way down the path from his house in Giverny.

SOME PAINTINGS MENTIONED IN OR OF INTEREST TO THIS NOVEL

M
ONET
, C
LAUDE
O
SCAR

The Seashore at Sainte-Adresse
. 1864. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis.

The Point of the Hève at Low Tide
. 1865. The Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas.

Luncheon on the Grass
. 1865–1866. Smaller version. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Two surviving panels of full version: Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Camille, or The Woman in a Green Dress
. 1866. Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany.

Women in the Garden
. 1866–67. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The Magpie
. 1868–1869. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse
. 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Garden at Argenteuil
. 1873. Private Collection.

Impression: Sunrise
. 1873. Musée Marmottan, Paris.

The Gare St-Lazare
. 1877. National Gallery, London.

Church at Vétheuil with Snow
. 1879. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Camille on Her Deathbed
. 1879. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne

Hoschedé Reading
. 1887. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Paintings of the Giverny gardens and water lily pond can be found in most major museums in the world.

B
AZILLE
, J
EAN
-F
RÉDÉRIC

Studio in the Rue de Furstenberg
. 1865. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

The Improvised Field Hospital
(Monet with an injured leg). 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Portrait of Renoir
. 1867. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Family Gathering
. 1867–1868. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

View of the Village
. 1868. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

Portrait of Edmond Maître
. 1869. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

La Toilette
. 1870. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

Studio in the Rue de la Condamine
. 1870. The Louvre, Paris.

R
ENOIR
, P
IERRE
-A
UGUSTE

All of Renoir’s approximately twenty café wall paintings have disappeared.

Lise Sewing
. 1866. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

Frédéric Bazille at His Easel
. 1867. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Lise and Sisley (
sometimes called
Alfred Sisley and His Wife)
. 1868. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Germany.

Camille Monet Reading
. 1872. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Portrait of Claude Monet
. 1872. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

P
ISSARRO
, C
AMILLE

Entrance to the Village of Voisins
. 1872. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

C
AROLUS
-D
URAN
, C
HARLES
A
UGUSTE
É
MILE

Portrait of Claude Monet
. 1867. Musée Marmottan, Paris.

Portrait of Madame Alice Hoschedé
. 1878. Benno and Nancy Schmidt Collection, Wildenstein Galleries, New York.

M
ANET
, É
DOUARD

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil
. 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I read far too many books about Monet and his circle during the writing of this novel to list them all. I would particularly like to name
Monet and Bazille: A Collaboration
(Champa, Pittman, and Brenneman);
The Impressionists at First Hand
(Denvir);
The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings
(Ganz and Kendall);
Claude Monet: Life and Art
(Tucker);
Monet und Camille
(Hansen and Herzogenrath);
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin
(Butler);
Frédéric Bazille: Prophet of Impressionism
(Musée Fabre Montpellier/Brooklyn Museum);
Frédéric Bazille and Early Impressionism
(Marandel and Daulte);
Monet
(Gordon and Forge);
Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self
(Levine); and all the work of Daniel Wildenstein. Any divergence from their excellent research was in the service of fiction.

Many kind friends read early drafts of this novel, sometimes more than once. I am grateful to Judith Ackerman, Robert Blumenfeld, Russell Clay, Ann Darby, Michael DiSchiavi, Susanne Dunlap, Laura Friedman, Philancy Holder, Katherine Kirkpatrick, Barbara Quick, Amy Rosenberg, Alice Tufel, Bina Valenzano of Brooklyn’s Bookmark Shop, and Bob Weber, as well as my late father, the painter James Mathieu, and my stepmother, Viraja. Special thanks for the amazing support of novelist Susan Dormady Eisenberg and actress/writer Christine Emmert, who not only read many drafts but sent me daily encouraging e-mails.

Much gratitude to my family for their constant support: my son Jesse Cowell and his friend Erica Langworthy; my son James Nordstrom, his wife, Jessica, and daughters, Emma and Hanna. Love to my two sisters, Jennie and Gabrielle, and their spouses and to my nephew and my late mother, the artist Dora. Also to my husband’s large, supportive family: his mother, Genia, his brothers and sister, Glenda, sons, spouses, grandchildren, and our cousin Lynnda.

Rachel Benzaquen and Monique-Marie Bray helped with my struggling French. My lifelong friend Renée Cafiero visited Giverny with me and was patient when I cried over paintings at the Musée Marmottan. Thanks to Robert Blumenfeld for French and his book
Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation
.

I cannot possibly list all the friends who cheered me on, but I thank all of you. I also must mention the clergy and parishioners of St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, and the congenial Sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit, all of whom sustain me spiritually, as well as my friends and colleagues at MDRC.

I am deeply grateful to my agent, Emma Sweeney, who advised me patiently through several drafts of the novel; and to Eva Talmadge and Justine Wenger of her staff; to my gifted editor, Suzanne O’Neill, Heather Proulx, Emily Timberlake, Tina Constable, Patty Berg, Annsley Rosner, Emily Lavelle, and to all the staff of Crown.

And, as always, thanks to my husband, Russell, who listened to all my hopes and fears and cooked for me. The characters in my novel lived with both of us so closely that he always expected to find Monet painting away in our living room and would, of course, have asked him to dinner.