A fascinating book about the later years of Monet's life and personality, as well as World War I. King delivers again. King has a way to make these stories so vivid and enjoyable to read. If you love reading about artists, biographies, history or loved King's other books than I highly recommend this book.

MAD ENCHANTMENT: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, by Ross King. Bloomsbury, $30. 403 pages. Audiobook read by Joel Richards, Audible, $22.71.

Reviewed by David Walton

Mad Enchantment sounds like an oxymoron, but it fairly summarizes historian Ross King’s depiction of the pain, turmoil, and impassioned energy that fueled Claude Monet’s huge paintings of water lilies, a titanic project the great Impressionist undertook at the very end of his long life.
King will be speaking September 15 at the Dallas Museum of Art, which displays Monet’s 1908 “Water Lilies,” a unique painting tied to one of the most tempestuous phases of the artist’s career.
Beginning in 2000 with Brunelleschi’s Dome, Ross King has built a critical and popular success on a series of lively, well written, highly informative histories of iconic works of art: Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Leonardo and the Last Supper, and most memorably, Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism.
Mad Enchantment is a final chapter in the history of Impressionism, set in the early decades of the Twentieth Century when the great painters of the 1860s were infirm and dying off, and new styles of painting were in ascendance.
King, who began his career as a novelist, likes to place his protagonist artists in dramatic contrast with some powerful patron or adversary—the two roles sometimes interchangeable, as in the case of Michelangelo’s pope. In Judgment of Paris, the contrast is between the revolutionary Impressionist Edouard Manet, whose paintings were for years rejected and reviled, and Ernest Meissonier, the premier painter of his time, who specialized in meticulously detailed battlefield scenes on small canvases—and is forgotten today.
Mad Enchantment opens in April, 1914, with a visit to Monet’s home in Giverny by the Tiger, Georges Clemenceau, who in a few years would lead France through the end of World War I and the subsequent peace settlement. Clemenceau and Monet were lifelong friends who lived within 20 miles of one another, and shared a passion for fine food and fast cars.
“Monet received his first speeding ticket in 1904,” King reports.
Now 74, Monet had fallen into “deep pessimism and sullen depression,” and quit painting. In 1911 his wife had died; in February 1914, his son Jean. In 1912 a violent thunderstorm had wrecked his garden. Worse, for an artist celebrated for his fine depictions of light and color, Monet’s “perfect eye” was becoming obscured by cataracts.
Clemenceau’s mission was to prod Monet back to work, and he succeeded beyond expectation when Monet took him into a cellar to see some paintings of water lilies he’d done years earlier.
That moment was the genesis of Monet’s “grande decoration,” the sequence of massive paintings he executed over the next 12 years, a vast conception brought to an end only by the artist’s death in 1926, at age 86.
That moment, too, generated another, equally prolonged drama that strained and eventually ruptured Monet’s friendship with Clemenceau. Monet’s intention was to gift these paintings to the French nation, to be displayed together in a single, oval-shaped galley.
Monet provided exacting specifications for the galley, and raged when they weren’t met. Time after time he missed deadlines to turn over the paintings, claiming they needed more work, until finally Clemenceau concluded wearily that Monet would hold onto them until he died—which he did. Sometimes in his rages and frustration Monet would destroy paintings—one of the canvases now in Paris’s Orangerie shows a large slash mark.
Parts of this book make painful reading: the descriptions of 1920s cataract surgery, and of Monet smashing and burning his paintings.
But King’s approach, as in all his books, is good-humored, flavored by what used be called “the human comedy.” Dealers, statesmen, admirers, resentful villagers, and a much-abused family fill out King’s portrait of the aging Monet, who was himself a walking paradox.
King points out for example that Monet, who liked to cry poverty and claimed as a young artist to have lived an entire winter on nothing but potatoes, was in those same years earning substantial sums from the sale of his paintings.
To accommodate his Grande Decoration, Monet constructed a studio 66 feet long and 49 feet high that towered over his house.
“Twenty years earlier he had campaigned vigorously against a plan by the town council to sell a piece of land to a chemical company proposing to build a starch factory,” King reports. “His campaign against uglification even saw him responding with fury to the appearance in Giverny of telegraph poles. Yet he was raising in the heart of Giverny a studio the size of an aircraft hanger, to which it bore an unfortunate resemblance.” (103)
The wonder, with all that assailed him, is that Monet was able to produce such a vast body of work, hundreds and hundreds of yards of paintings. For all he destroyed, he left behind hundreds more—so many it takes almost as long to scroll through the reproductions on Art Authority, as to read King’s book.
King’s books with their strong narrative line adapt particularly well to audio, freeing the eye for illustrations. Judgment of Paris, read with high Edwardian zeal by actor Tristan Layton, is a special favorite. Storyteller Joel Richards delivers an expressive reading of Mad Enchantment in a bedrock American voice, in just under 12 hours. For a sample, go to TK.
Best of all, King’s marvelous storytelling draws us back to these sublime, timeless paintings, so remote from—and yet, paradoxically, so necessary a part of—our own unquiet times.