‘King effectively puts readers at the painter’s side as he rails against the impossible task he set for himself, suffering the “tortures” of painting and slashing canvases.

He ultimately brings the man and his work into perfect focus while increasing his audience’s interest in both all the more.’ ‘Readers will rejoice at this critical and social “biography” of Monet’s stunningly ambitious final signature painting cycle, Water Lilies, a deeply immersive companion to the author’s memorable The Judgement of Paris … King is ever the brilliant docent murmuring the right, telling details and critical backstories in our ear as we move through space and time. Selected by Newsday as one of the 10 Best Books of 2016.Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Mad Enchantment presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture-from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the Water Lilies as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again, this time on a more ambitious scale than ever before. His famously acute vision-what Paul Cezanne called “the most prodigious eye in the history of painting”-was threatened by cataracts. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. The history of these remarkable canvases begins early in 1914, when French newspapers began reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world’s wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes. Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies. Their calmness and beauty also conceal the terrible personal torments-the loss of loved ones, the horrors of World War I, the infirmities of age-that he suffered in the last dozen years of his life. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” Yet these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, shade, depth and color. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet’s brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are the most famous. coverĬlaude Monet is perhaps the world’s most beloved artist. Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies U.S.

Domino by Ross King