With her richly textured novels Susan Vreeland has offered pioneering portraits of the artist’s life. Now, in a collection of profound wisdom and beauty, she explores the transcendent power of art through the eyes of ordinary people. Life Studies begins with historic tales that, rather than focusing directly on the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters themselves, render those on the periphery—their lovers, servants, and children—as their personal experiences play out against those of Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and others. Vreeland then gives us contemporary stories in which her characters—a teacher, a construction worker, and an orphan for example—encounter art in meaningful, often surprising ways. A fascinating exploration of the lasting strength of art in everyday life, Life Studies is a dazzling addition to Vreeland’s outstanding body of work. As if lining a gallery's white walls, the 17 stories in Life Studies are exquisitely crafted. ("The Portland Oregonian") Delivers a rich palette. Light and beauty pour from the pages in deft, accessible prose strokes. ("The San Diego Union-Tribune") Susan Vreeland is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Clara and Mr. Tiffany and Girl in Hyacinth Blue . She lives in San Diego. Mimi with a Watering Can Paris, 1876 Jérôme did not want to go to his sister’s garden party. He did not want to mix cordially with her motley Montmartre neighbors, did not want to sit on a crumbling stone wall among buzzing insects in her half-wild yard drinking that sharp piccolo from the last scraggly Montmartre vineyard, making trivial conversation with some tinsmith or shoemaker or painter Claire might have invited. “But this is the second time she’s asked,” Élise said, sipping her coffee in the sunny breakfast room with their four-year-old dancing a paper doll around her bowl of porridge. “She’ll think you despise her.” He loved his sister, but he would much prefer to stay in his dressing gown all morning reading Baudelaire and Verlaine, his method, though of dubious effect, of resisting self-pity, and to spend the afternoon walking one of Baron Haussmann’s new grand boulevards with Élise and Mimi, which might make him feel expansive. Maybe stopping for lunch at Chez Edgard might help him throw off this malaise of dullness. Then they’d stroll home through the Tuileries, or cross the river to Luxembourg Gardens, and not have to talk to anyone else. All week at the bank he had to be with people, affecting cordiality to clients and to Monsieur le directeur, when there was no juice of cordiality on his tongue. He saw only gray walls, gray desktop, gray ledger books, gray suits, gray hair. He had stood face to face with the director the day before, not even listening to him, only noticing the sickening grayness of the man’s skin. He’d wanted to scream, to curse the monotony right in front of the man, to leap out the door and never come back. A disappointment in life had taken hold of him lately, originating nowhere, everywhere, a resentment with no logical reason because he had all a man could want—except the thing he couldn’t identify. This morning the dull power of that irony had shocked him. As he lay in bed, just at the moment of waking, the instant when he became conscious that it was Saturday, which should have made him happy, he couldn’t open his eyes. They were stuck shut. With a shudder of panic, he’d made a conscious effort to lift his lids, but the dryness underneath had sealed them shut, and all he succeeded in doing was raising his eyebrows. He lay disoriented for a long time before he tried again. One eye opened part way, with a soft pop, but he’d had to push up the lid of the other with the pad of his ring finger. An absurd experience. Ridiculous to attach any significance to it. Still, he wanted to erase the fear of its happening again by doing something absorbing, by thinking of something exquisite—by reading poetry. He finished his coffee and noticed Lise’s hopeful, liquid blue eyes. “All right, we’ll go,” he said, not sure that he could be very sociable. Mimi jumped down from her chair, and stretched her arms out to her sides, raising one arm while lowering the other. “Can we see the windmills, Papa?” “Naturellement.” He touched Mimi’s head and felt her blond childhood curls slip between his fingers like silk threads. Upstairs, in their bedroom easy chair, he had time to read one poem before Élise came in to sit at her vanity and dress her hair and prepare her toilette. In a moment she would talk, and the poetic thought would fly away. C’est l’Ennui!, he read, l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire. An involuntary tear. And for what? Because Baudelaire couldn’t recognize present beauty? Because life is too good? Because in a moment the silk of his wife’s dressing gown might slide down to reveal the shape and smoothness of the globe of her breast and he might smell her sweet musk scent? It made no sense. “Life is good,” his father