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. Here King (Brunelleschi's Dome) turns his mind, heart, and eyes to Claude Monet (1840-1926), his prolific oeuvre, his celebrated home, and his carefully curated gardens at Giverny in northern France. Beginning the story on the eve of World War I, King takes readers through the 1920s. He shows us an aging, ailing, yet determined artist, one of the last surviving impressionists in a time that celebrated the "wild beasts," aka les fauves, and monitored the seismic stirrings of the war, cubism, and abstraction. Monet desperately needed to make his final creative statement and longed to enjoy the enduring prestige of a museum (L'Orangerie) devoted to his purpose-made art. Portraying such iconic characters as Monet's friend/champion George -Clemenceau, 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. VERDICT This work is essential. Expect strong demand.-Barbara Genco, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Best-selling King (Leonardo and the Last Supper, 2012) consummately meshes biography with art history as he turns the creation of one resounding masterpiece into a portal onto the artist's life. His most recent inquiry, his seventh, is particularly affecting, perhaps because the legendary Impressionist Monet and his revolutionary paintings remain so radiantly vital and exquisitely evocative. Writing with a historical novelist's attunement to the interplay of place, temperament, and society, King brings readers to Giverny, where Monet designed his inspiring garden with its now immortalized pond, Japanese bridge, and water lilies. Right from the start, in 1895, Monet, age 55, envisioned a circular room with wall-filling canvases depicting the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color, a dream that precipitated 30 years of struggle. King sumptuously describes the pleasures of Giverny, from Monet's delight in food and wine to his close and sympathetic extended family, joys imperiled by WWI and Monet's terrible anxiety and depression and ever-worsening eyesight. Yet he persisted in painting dauntingly complex works in his mad striving for the impossible, sustained, as King reveals in unique and moving detail, by his profound friendship with the heroic prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who, after Monet's death, helped secure a permanent home for the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. Never before has the full drama and significance of Monet's magnificent Water Lilies been conveyed with such knowledge and perception, empathy and wonder.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

IS THERE anything left to be said about Claude Monet, the celebrated Impressionist who took painting out of the studio and into the breezy, sneezy countryside? He gave us the defining view of French leisure and remains a perpetually bankable subject of museum blockbusters. His images of poplar trees and stacks of wheat, of stone cliffs off the coast of Normandy, of women strolling beneath the shade of their tilted parasols - they suggest that life is inherently pleasurable, a series of languorous afternoons whose only hazard is overexposure to the sun. Yet Monet was plenty radical, especially in his Grande Décoration, as he referred to his wall-to-wall paintings of water lilies. He began the series in 1914, at the age of 73, setting up his easel beside his pond in Giverny and staying put as World War I flared around him. Ross King's "Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies" is an engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails. By 1920, Monet was twice widowed and suffering from cataract-clouded vision. His confidence was at such a low that he frequently destroyed finished paintings. He had been famous for so long that many people assumed he was dead. As the last surviving French Impressionist, he pined for the company of absent friends - Renoir and Cézanne, especially - and felt estranged from a younger generation that considered his work passé beside the razzmatazz of Picasso's demoiselles. "Les Nymphéas," as his water lilies paintings were officially titled, are among art history's greatest last acts. Compared with Monet's earlier paintings, with their direct transcriptions of the countryside, the water lilies dispense with contours and boundaries and veer toward abstraction. They mark the advent of "all-over painting," a phrase that was coined in New York in the 1950 s, when Monet was abruptly rediscovered. Critics who were eager to construct an instant lineage for Jackson Pollock's then-new drip paintings looked to Monet, who, though trained as a 19th-century realist, helped pioneer the 20th-century belief that vision is fundamentally subjective, a rush of shifting sensations, a stream (or pond?) of consciousness. The Monet who emerges from King's pages is a sympathetic and vivid character - less the wizened patriarch of French Impressionism than a crotchety septuagenarian afflicted with toothaches. Tired of his once-frequent forays into the French countryside, he reinvented himself as a homebody painter and designed his pond as a way of solving his problem of what to paint. In the process of constructing it, he applied to the local authorities for permission to reroute the Ru river to his property. His neighbors were initially suspicious. Here was a celebrity artist who seemed to snub French horticulture in favor of Oriental traditions. Instead of manicured hedges and Versailles artifice, he built a water garden of Zen tranquillity, complete with a Japanese foot bridge and stalks of bamboo. To be sure, Monet had his partisans. They included his doting biographer, Gustave Geffroy, and the art critic Octave Mirbeau, who frequently traveled out to Giverny to see his work. And then there was Georges Clemenceau - yes, that Clemenceau, the world-famous statesman who steered France through World War I and served twice as the country's socially progressive prime minister. The friendship between Monet and Clemenceau amounts to its own fascinating story and resembles an odd-couple comedy. Monet had little interest in politics and never voted in an election. But Clemenceau was a true intellectual with a daunting cultural range. His apartment in Paris was cluttered with his Japanese collectibles - tiny netsuke figures, lacquered tea bowls, woodblock prints by Utamaro and Hiroshige, a reminder that he and Monet were not provincial in their tastes. You can even see Monet's lily pond as an expression of their shared passion for things Japanese and their increasing closeness after the end of their respective marriages. It was Clemenceau, implausibly, who oversaw the treatment of Monet's eye problems, an "unspeakable drama," as he described it. He found an ophthalmologist for Monet and persuaded the artist to undergo a much-postponed cataract operation. Monet did not excel as a patient. During his long recuperation, he sent off cross and accusing letters to his doctor. His eyes watered all the time; he saw black dots floating in front of him. He regretted the operation and told the doctor it was "criminal to have me put in this situation." A second operation was needed. Clemenceau, an architect of the Versailles Treaty, drew on his deepest diplomatic skills to make peace between Monet and the eye doctor. To be sure, Clemenceau had a professional interest in Monet's well-being. At the end of World War I, immediately after the signing of the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, Monet graciously offered to donate some paintings to the people of France. After nearly a decade of on-again, off-again negotiations, a series of now-famous lily paintings were installed on specially constructed, curving walls at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, surrounding the viewer with a blue-hued blur of water and plants and reflections of clouds. Astoundingly, the murals were ignored for years and treated shabbily. As King notes, they were once covered up to make room for a temporary exhibition of Flemish tapestries. King, who has previously written books on Brunelleschi's dome, Leonardo's "Last Supper" and Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, has made it a practice-bordering-onformula to take on just one work of art at a time. This lends his books a welcome focus. His prose is admirably clear, although, in describing paintings, he can lapse into hyperbole. At the Orangerie, for instance, three of Monet's murals "are flanked by the graceful curves of truncated willow trees showering their branches in fragile, flickering cascades as they gather us in a sweeping embrace." The book is short on analysis and fails to definitively explain the role played by Monet's illness in the development of his late style. Nonetheless, "Mad Enchantment" offers a moving portrait of the artist as an old man, and usefully shatters the myth of him as a lone genius sequestered in his garden, communing with the birds. It has often been said that Monet painted the water lilies in near-total seclusion, so it's heartening to read about the bustle of appreciative people around him, from his staff of gardeners, to his stepdaughter, Blanche, who lived with him until the end, to his dear friend Clemenceau, who was at his bedside, holding his hand, when he died. In art, as in so much else, it takes a village. ? DEBORAH SOLOMON, the art critic of WNYC public radio, is writing a biography of the artist Jasper Johns.