Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet And The Painting Of The Water Lilies

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Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic & beloved works of art of the past century Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil & sadness for the artist The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time & in the process presents a compelling & original portrait of one of our most popular & cherished artists By the outbreak of war in 1914 Monet then in his mid-seventies was one of the world's most famous & successful painters with a large house in the country a fleet of automobiles & a colossal reputation However he had virtually given up painting following the death of his wife Alice in 1911 & the onset of blindness a year later Nonetheless it was during this period of sorrow ill health & creative uncertainty that
- as the guns roared on the Western Front
- he began the most demanding & innovative paintings he had ever attempted Encouraged by close friends such as Georges Clemenceau France's dauntless prime minister Monet would work on these magnificent paintings throughout the war years & then for the rest of his life So obsessed with his monumental task that the village barber was summoned to clip his hair as he worked beside his pond he covered hundreds of yards of canvas with shimmering layers of pigment As his ambitions expanded with his paintings he began planning what he intended to be his legacy to the world the Musee Claude Monet' in the Orangerie in Paris Drawing on letters & memoirs & focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life Mad Enchantment gives an intimate portrayal of Claude Monet in all his tumultuous complexity & firmly places his water lily paintings among the greatest achievements in the history of art