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The jacket deals with the book's title in two discrete ways. Claude Monet appears as a facsimile of the artist's signature and Life and Art in a typeface presumably chosen by the cover's designer. This separation is, in a way, appropriate. Here once was an entity "Claude Monet" who was painter, landowner, gardener, husband, father, sponger. Now there is only the possibility of being a biographer and/or an art historian. The phrase life and art is conventional and in this order intimates that without the life there could be no art. The somewhat rarer "art and life" suggests mere existence should take a back seat to the creations that result from it. For this book, the conception life: art might be preferable.

Paul Tucker provides a straightforward chronological analysis of Monet's career and production, beginning with a warning about the Monet myth, of which the artist himself was the wiliest fabricator. In the frontispiece photograph, a portly figure, with a long snowy beard stained only by cigarette smoke at moustache level, looks alertly at us, dressed in casual tweeds over a shirt with frilled cuffs, signalling a rather old-fashioned rusticity. The semiotic clues strongly suggest "artist" rather than, say, "stockbroker". Yet this benign old man, responsible for so many seemingly natural images of sun-dappled riverside walks and the like, bought his tweeds at the exclusive "Old England" on Paris's superchic Boulevard des Capucines, and played the stock market from the 1880s. His life was as carefully orchestrated as his art. Tucker notes Monet's quick temper, his whingeing letters asking for money when the only cause of poverty was his own extreme profligacy and even warns that the artist "was not necessarily the kind of person one would want for a friend". Yet Zola was his friend and Monet's heartfelt letters of admiration for Zola's courage in the Dreyfus affair are genuinely moving. The man emerges as complex, and so does the art, although the two are not much linked in this book, and this is in a sense right.

Tucker stresses Monet's patriotism, which in "life" seems generally acceptable, although it would be a qualified patriot who fled to England, as Monet did, to avoid possible conscription during the Franco-Prussian war. There are bigger problems, however, with the same subject in "art"; in the linking, for example, of Monet's series of paintings of poplars with the enduring significance of this tree as a patriotic "tree of liberty". While one cannot rule out some possible connection here for Monet, the relationship seems tenuous. Art is here dealt with much better as art than as a possible reflection of history. Tucker favours a kind of updated formalism for analysing paintings and occasionally this triumphantly informs the reader/ spectator's sensations. Discussing "The Highway Bridge at Argenteuil" (1874), Tucker elegantly argues that this seemingly unmediated suburban riverscape is tightly organised by the artist to provide a logically ordered pattern by the span of the bridge, the bank of the river and the masts and booms of the boats.

All periods of Monet's life are given virtually equal consideration, and generous colour reproductions give a good idea of his range. Many readers will be surprised by the stark juxtaposition of sea and sky (and absolutely nothing else) in "Sunset from Pourville" (1882). Monet's usual insistence on the presence of humanity (even if only obliquely) is abandoned. The illustration of some unusual representations of the Gare St Lazare is equally valuable.

Ed Lilley is senior lecturer in the history of art, University of Bristol.