![]() 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. ![]()
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