Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

About this book

From bestselling author Ross King a brilliant portrait of the legendary artist and the story of his most memorable achievement. Claude Monet is perhaps the worlds most beloved artist and among all his creations the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Monet intended the water lilies to provide "an asylum of peaceful meditation." Yet as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced in trying to capture the fugitive effects of light water and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life. Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny and a new generation of younger artists led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914 French newspapers were reporting that Monet by then seventy-three had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife Alice and his eldest son Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called the most prodigious eye in the history of painting--was threatened by cataracts. And yet despite ill health self-doubt and advancing age Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture.