Meaning of some words

Question

The closing decades of an artist’s life do not generally make the biographer’s heart beat faster, but Claude Monet is one of a handful of painters who bucks the pattern of an irrelevant old age. While it’s true that by the time he was 73 he had accumulated all the usual dragging baggage – outhouses full of fancy cars, a taste for expensive wine and a sprawl of dependants – it was also now that he produced career-defining work. More specifically, he produced what he called his Grande Décoration, consisting of those eight giant waterlily murals that curve around the Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris.
Could you help me understand the meaning of highlighted words in this context?
Thanks in advance.

verbose · Answer

Dragging means something that slows down or impedes. See definition 4a at the Merriam-Webster site. So "dragging baggage" is the impedimenta that keeps an artist from continuing his work. The biographer says that most famous artists in their old age acquire enough distractions from their work, such as fancy cars, expensive wines, etc., that their work suffers as a result.
One of those dragging forces is a sprawl of dependents. Famous people tend to attract an entourage, a set of hangers-on who bask in reflected glory. Often those hangers-on include dependents, relatives and friends who are supported by the celebrity's money: distant cousins, hapless aunts, long-lost schoolmates, and the like. Sprawl is "an irregularly spread or scattered group or mass". The idea is that the dependents are metaphorically, perhaps on occasion literally, bunched about in groups around the celebrity.
Monet, despite having acquired "dragging baggage" including "a sprawl of dependents" by virtue of his status as a successful artist, nevertheless stayed undistracted enough that he was able to produce his best-known works despite that.

Meaning of some words

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