Taschen’s small-format artist monographs are amazing, aren’t they. Clean, friendly book design, and smart, accessible content, and outstanding reproduction quality set the bar very high for users of art books. Christoph Heinrich’s 2007 Monet is an excellent resource for readers with a casual interest in Monet, and it’s full of pleasant surprises for artists and scholars who have a more serious interest. I studied Monet in a graduate art history class, and I refer to Impressionism in a theory course, so Heinrich’s explanation of the Salon and Monet’s interactions with it provided me good reminders and new insights about the context of his beginnings as a French painter. (My bonus serendipity about this title is that I picked it up while reading through Zola’s The Ladies Paradise. The time period of Heinrich’s first chapter and Zola’s novel align precisely.) And the opening, verso, full-page reproduction of Studio Still Life, 1861, is gorgeous!