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

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

Claude Monet is perhaps the world’s most beloved artist. Among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are the most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet’s brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. 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. 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.

Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies. 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. 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, this time on a more ambitious scale than ever before.

Mad Enchantment paperback by Ross KingU.K. cover

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.

  • Winner of the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize
  • Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
  • Selected by Newsday as one of the 10 Best Books of 2016

Book Details:

  • Author: Ross King
  • Published Year: 2017
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Bloomsbury
    • US: Interart
Ross King

Ross King

Ross King is the bestselling author of books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. Among his books are Brunelleschi’s Dome (2000), Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (2002), The Judgment of Paris (Governor General’s Award, 2006), Leonardo and The Last Supper (Governor General’s Award, 2012), and Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (Charles Taylor Prize, 2017). He has also published two novels (Domino and Ex-Libris), a biography of Niccolò Machiavelli, an...
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Book Reviews

  • "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. He ultimately brings the man and his work into perfect focus while increasing his audience’s interest in both all the more."
    Library Journal (Starred Review)
  • "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. As in his superb The Judgment of Paris (2006), about the rise of Impressionism, the author sets this fascinating portrayal of the larger-than-life artist—known equally for his “obstreperous temperament” and warm hospitality, for his love of gardening, family life, fast cars, and gourmet food—against a backdrop of the raging war, politics, history, and changing tastes in art. King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last Impressionist standing at the end of one of history’s most remarkable art movements."
    Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
  • "‘[A]n engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails … The Monet who emerges from King’s pages is a sympathetic and vivid character."
    New York Times Book Review
  • "Sensitive, deeply researched and altogether delightful."
    Newsday
  • "If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anyone who is not drawn into Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King is truly visually impaired … Mad Enchantment is a book to be read and enjoyed; it is a learning experience for those both learned and inexperienced in the world of art. Ross King does an exemplary job of bringing Claude Monet back to life. This one belongs on the bookshelf within easy reach."
    New York Journal of Books
  • "Ross King has a track record when it comes to turning such art stories into gripping narratives … His method is expansive, including personal, political, social and cultural context."
    The Sunday Times
  • "[King] consummately meshes biography with art history as he turns the creation of one resounding masterpiece into a portal on the artist's life . Writing with a historical novelist's attunement to the interplay of peace, temperament, and society, King brings readers to Giverny . King sumptuously describes the pleasures of Giverny . Never before has the full drama and significance of Monet's magnificent Water Lilies been conveyed with such knowledge and perception, empathy and wonder'."
    Booklist
  • "King is a skilled guide to Monet's bastardy. This book, like his earlier ones, is as much about the artist's times as his work."
    The Times
  • "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. . A fine, fluent book . A careful unpicking of cherished art-historical narratives."
    Katheryn Hughes ― Guardian
  • "A homage to how the genius of Monet's extraordinary eye came finally to be realised . King has a skill for turning over unlikely narrative stones."
    Lucy Lethbridge ― Literary Review
  • "Ross King's Monet might not be an easy man to like, but King is also very good with the wider picture, and the fascination of this lively and entertaining book lies as much in its portrait of first-world-war France as it does in its depiction of Giverny . But it is in the period detail and character portraits that Mad Enchantment really comes to life."
    Spectator
  • "Lyrical and dynamic ."
    Catholic Herald
  • "Ross King lyrically explores the personal paradise that Monet constructed at Giverny . King's title sounds overexcited, but he justifies it."
    Books of the Year ― Observer
  • "Engrossing history . This scholarly story of Monet's greatest project is told with tremendous humour and is filled with fascinating insights."
    History Today
  • "[A] fine account of the making of Monet's final masterpiece."
    Daily Mail