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

"Fascinating account of iconic artist, his late life and last images" according to Daffy Du. Make no mistake. This book is more about history than art. (Or the history of art, as I was taught it in college, where images cannot be separated from the artist and the times that produced them.) As someone who majored in art history in college, I found its blend of art, context and personality utterly compelling. But if you're looking for lavish illustrations of Monet's celebrated water lily paintings, as one reviewer lamented, you won't find them. (The Internet has scads of images of them, of course.)If, however, you're interested in a detailed, comprehensive and incisive account of Monet the man and the circumstances . King at his best William T. Lodge This is not, nor does it pretend to be, the complete biography of Monet. Like King's other works dealing with an artist, he focuses on a specific work. In this case, Monet's painting of the Water Lilies.King looks at Monet at the end of his career, when he was asked to complete a series of paintings of water lilies to be donated to France. King documents the process by which these paintings were created. As usual, King gives the reader a sense not only of what was going on in Monet's world but in the world around him. In particular, King tells about the friendship between Monet and Georges Clemenceau.If you've read King be. lakegirlI feel I have a much better understanding of him as a man after reading this lakegirl41 Monet in his later years, struggling with cataracts which caused color changes, eye pain from the sun's glare and reflection off the water, as well as blurred vision as he was struggling to paint. Amazingly, he overcame these seemingly impossible obstacles to create his water lily series. Always an admirer of his work, I feel I have a much better understanding of him as a man after reading this book.. 1 said I feel I have a much better understanding of him as a man after reading this. Monet in his later years, struggling with cataracts which caused color changes, eye pain from the sun's glare and reflection off the water, as well as blurred vision as he was struggling to paint. Amazingly, he overcame these seemingly impossible obstacles to create his water lily series. Always an admirer of his work, I feel I have a much better understanding of him as a man after reading this book.

As World War I exploded within hearing distance of his house at Giverny, he was facing his own personal crucible. In 1911, aged 71, his adored wife, Alice, died, plunging him into deep mourning. King tells the full history of the special circumstances in which Monet created the Water Lilies. The extraordinarily dramatic history behind the creation of these paintings is little-known; Ross King's new audiobook tells that story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most beloved artists. Using letters, memoirs, and other sources not employed by other biographers, and focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life, Ross King reveals a more complex, more human, more intimate Claude Monet than has ever been portrayed and firmly places his water lily project among the greatest achievements in the history of art.. We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. Then his eldest son, Jean, fell ill and