Astonishingly, The Unknown Monet delivers just what the title promises. Drawing upon a previously unavailable account of Monet’s life, the authors have been able to fill in many of the blanks so frustrating to modern biographers. This material not only provides a very new image of Monet, especially during the 1850s and 1860s, but it offers a new context for his drawings and pastels. The works on paper were included in the final volume of Daniel Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné (Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 5, Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1991)—although not in the more accessible Taschen reprint (Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne: Taschen, 1996), but they have been treated as an afterthought in most studies of Monet’s oeuvre. A few of the caricatures he made when he was a teenager have been reproduced often, although without being connected to the rest of his work. His drawings are the subject of a section of William Seitz’s Claude Monet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1960, ills. 64–84) and an appendix in John House’s Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, 227–30), where House also mentions, but does not discuss, the pastels. Thus...