The "luminous abyss" of Monet's Water Lilies

On the eve of the First World War, Claude Monet was one of the world's most beloved painters. He was perhaps the most renowned and influential of the Impressionists and had little left to prove artistically.

He was 73 years old and his eyesight, so finely attuned to the minute-by-minute changes in the play of light upon water and plants, was misted by cataracts. He remained shattered by the death of his wife Alice three years earlier — so disconsolate that he despaired of ever picking up brush and palette again. 

"If work went well...he was happy and he would sing operatic songs. But if it didn't go well, he would rage. And he really did rage...he would go Norman Bates on the canvasses and stab them, slash them.- Ross King, on Claude Monet

But with the rumblings of a catastrophic war sounding in the near distance, on the verge of destroying much of a continent and a generation, Monet found his pluck and embarked on one of the most ambitious artistic projects of his time. The immense canvases he toiled on for the next few years unveiled a placid universe of colour and light, water and plants, in his beloved ponds strewn with water lilies floating among the reflections of clouds and weeping willows. 

Known to the world simply as Monet's Water Lilies, they now occupy a great round room in the Orangerie in the Tuileries Garden of Paris, and they stand as the capstone of Impressionism.

Monet's Water Lilies are the latest subject for Ross King, who grew up in small-town Saskatchewan and went on to become one of Canada's best non-fiction writers and chroniclers of art history. His most recent book is called Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies. 

Click the button above to hear Michael's interview with Ross King.