PositiveFinancial Times\"Russian art historian Semenova, with the help of Shchukin’s grandson André Delocque, wonderfully evokes the contradictory worlds of the thrusting Moscow merchant class and the swirling ferment of the pre-Bolshevik city ... Perceptive, pacy, at times sentimental and over-florid, The Collector fleshes out the human story of the Shchukin family tantalisingly dangled by the exhibition, and finishes with an unputdownable coda.\
Linda Nochlin
PositiveFinancial TimesIt is an eclectic revision. You expect Honoré Daumier’s and Gustave Doré’s socially conscious illustrations, but Nochlin casts a broader net ... [Nochlin] is surely right that not to refresh our focus is to risk turning culture into \'ritualised entombment, the burial celebration of dead artefacts by ossified sensibilities.\' Asking us to look again, this slim, erudite, enlightened volume is a heartfelt coda to her oeuvre.
Barbara Ehrlich White
MixedThe Financial TimesThis documentary life, based on thousands of letters, many unpublished, which she has collected since 1961, is the most personal account of any Impressionist ever written. It engages with Renoir from a domestic rather than art historical perspective, bringing to quotidian life the stick-thin, wiry, energetic painter, pipe in mouth, as he converses in a rasping guttural Paris accent to friends and lovers, rearranges his cluttered studio, chats to servants in the grand homes of his collectors … For Renoir devotees, this is an unmissable, revelatory account. Flawed, however, by extreme pedantry of style and simplistic commentary, it will soon lose the general reader, whose level of understanding White doubly underrates … Renoir was complex, subtle, elegant and talked down to no one. You can find him in these pages, but with its treasure trove of primary sources, this book could have been so much better.
