We meet a number of Monets in Jackie Wullschläger’s new biography—the first to be published in English on the acclaimed painter. First we meet Oscar, Claude’s given name, a teenage caricaturist sketching notable figures in the port city of Le Havre. By 1861, Oscar had grown into a brash young man headed to military service in Algeria. He returned a painter reinvented as Claude and apprenticing in the studio of Charles Gleyre. His fortunes waxed and waned over the years: he was poor in Paris, poor in Saint-Adresse, poor in Vétheuil; then lovestruck and lusting after his patron Ernest Hoschedé’s wife Alice; then reigning over a collection of artists at the fashionable Café Riche. By 1883, he was a bourgeois gardener at Giverny eating enough to feed four, and by 1911, an aging widower fearing himself blind.

The collective Monets all share, according to Wullschläger, the determination and self-possession required to be a great artist. Monet, in committing his life to his perception, made art something new, liberating painting from its descriptive function and lending it an interiority that would come to be called modern.

Monet did not do this all alone, Wullschläger acknowledges. One of the great pleasures of the book is the picture it paints of the Parisian art world at the time of its most profound transformation: the move away from a rigid, state-run academy toward a more diverse marketplace driven by individuals instead of institutions, what Charles Harrison and Cynthia White termed the dealer-critic system. It is this system that enabled the rise of a more experimental style of painting, one concerned with everyday life rather than grand narratives, and of an expressive rather than an exacting style. Several other art historical celebrities make cameos in the book: the painters Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Paul Cézanne; the legendary dealer Paul Durand-Ruel; the novelist and art critic Emile Zola. Wullschläger nonetheless declares Monet the leader of Impressionism, finding his work to be the “most extreme” example of a commitment to the fleeting effects of light one observed when painting en plein air.

Wullschläger combed thousands of letters to reconstruct a year-by-year account of the artist’s life, pulling rich quotes that give us a sense of his voice, at least as he wanted it recorded. That many of the other characters in the book fall rather flat may be as much a product of Monet’s characterizations as the author’s. Bazille, whom Monet constantly badgered for money in his early years, is “modest” and “uncertain.” When he declines to respond to his friend’s demands, Monet calls him “the most ignoble, laziest person I’ve ever met.” Monet casts Bazille and Renoir as conservative followers of their mutual teacher, Charles Gleyre, while Monet claims the part of the forward-thinking outsider, declaring “I preached rebellion to them.”

Monet rebelled through his dedication to nature—a force greater, in his eyes, than that of tradition and education. This nature, Wullschläger argues, was more internal than external nature. Such reorientation was necessary in an increasingly industrialized world; looking inward, Monet (and, by extension, his viewers) could avoid difficult questions about how nature was being threatened. “For us, as for his first audiences, Monet’s painting offers respite from an increasingly technological, urbanized world, while his faith in a cohesion between the human and natural enduringly appeals as our harmony with the environment disintegrates.”

Late in his life, as industrialization transformed the countryside, that “harmony” and “respite” had to be managed and manufactured. To make the pond for his garden at Giverny, Monet diverted water from a nearby river despite the objections of local farmers. His famed water lilies required the careful attention of up to six gardeners, and needed to be prepared each morning before the artist sat down to paint. A visitor recorded how “everything has been carefully put in place” and Monet’s “special gardener, working from a small boat, has finished soaking every water lily pad in order to remove the dust.” Certainly, one response to environmental destruction—if you are a person of privilege—is to retreat into an elaborate fiction. Monet’s paintings, and our sustained appreciation of them, begs the question as to whether gazing upon those painted water lilies generates care for actual environments, a question that is becoming ever more relevant as contemporary Eco artists continue to grapple with whether an isolated experience of beauty can inspire a greater appreciation for the world around us.

The book’s other major question concerns the nature of genius and the indiscretions it permits. Wullschläger argues that women played a key role in Monet’s work, observing that “three times, Monet’s art changed decisively when the woman sharing his life changed.” These three women are his first wife, Camille Doncieux, his second wife, Alice Raingo, and his stepdaughter Blanche Hoschedé. Reading about the women who made a man’s genius possible from the vantage of our present political maelstrom, I found myself increasingly intolerant of the artist’s egotism. The artist’s second wife, Alice, left alone, with very little money, in charge of eight children, wrote letters to request aid in what Monet referred to as “outbursts”; her “depressive tendency” and “resentments” mount as the artist spends months painting away from home. Wullschläger is aware of her protagonist’s flaws, pointing out his tendency toward “a vanity born of supreme egotism” and “a passive aggression so ingrained that it is difficult to know the extent to which his desperate letters were also calculated.”

Wullschläger gives the sense, however, that the paintings make it all worth it, describing his work as a “heroic achievement.” While her descriptions of the paintings are generous and evocative, the black and white reproductions that form the bulk of the biography’s illustrations don’t have quite the same effect. The next time I stand before one of Monet’s canvases, perhaps I will be lulled into rapture—I am as susceptible to beauty as anyone. For now, reading Monet offers a timely reflection on how a modern notion of nature came to be defined via individual temperaments, with all their attendant faults.