Mad Enchantment Quotes

“Clemenceau knew, was to keep his friend’s spirits high. “What more could one ask for?” he wrote to him in September. “You’ve had the best life that a man could dream of. There’s an art to leaving as well as to entering.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Monet served his guests duck seasoned with nutmeg and treated himself—despite concerned looks from Blanche—to great swigs of white wine.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Everyone was agreed that the master looked energetic and youthful—sixty rather than eighty. “He provides striking evidence,” wrote Alexandre, “of the inanity of what used to be called the age limit.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Like a shark that would drown if it stopped swimming, Monet seemed to believe that he would die if he stopped painting. By the summer of 1920 it was clear that he would be painting the Grande Décoration “until the end.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“The two men discussed in lip-smacking detail “pike with white butter, grilled red mullet under vine leaves, and the fresh saltiness of Breton oysters in their grey shells.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“The story may also have drawn on comments by the Japanese artist Hokusai, who in old age (he lived to eighty-nine) signed his works “The Old Man Mad About Painting.” “I have drawn things since I was six,” Hokusai supposedly reported. “All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true constructions of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred I shall certainly have reached a magnificent level. And when I am a hundred and ten, everything—every dot, every dash—will live.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“My dear Sir, I think you isolate yourself too much, and a stay of about a week in Paris, in the midst of friends who love you, would dispel your little troubles.”7”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“The audience may have been startled to learn the dubious fact, aired by Guitry in his voice-over on his Renoir segment, that Monet and Renoir as young men once spent an entire year living on potatoes.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“What room, indeed, could have been large enough to encompass Monet’s Grande Décoration? For some of the guests, there may well have been a faint whiff of folly about the project: such a major undertaking in a time of war by a man on the cusp of his seventy-fifth birthday.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Although not officially one of Les Dix, Monet was a regular fixture at the monthly Goncourt lunches. They were one of the few things that could lure him to Paris, the attraction being good food and good conversation in the company of his boon companions.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Clemenceau. “One may have been the most intimate friend of Monet,” he remarked to Guitry, “without ever having known the man’s thoughts.”11”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“soldiers gave the same pitiful cry: “Maman.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Madame Caillaux, wearing a black dress and a hat of black straw, sustained herself on the first day of her trial by eating a luncheon of jellied eggs and salt-marsh lamb washed down with a bottle of Évian water.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Monet himself wrote a letter to Geffroy expressing his desire to have his water lily paintings decorate a room, creating a “flowery aquarium” in which the owner could relax and restore himself. He envisaged the canvases “covering the walls, unifying them, giving the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no bank.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“THE GREAT SUCCESS of Monet’s 1909 exhibition led to calls for the forty-eight paintings to be kept together as part of a decorative ensemble.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“If Monet had been written off by some critics as an irrelevance, Gillet’s claim about “pure abstraction” placed him, in 1909, at the forefront of modern art.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“His success when the paintings were finally exhibited in 1909 was the result of a sophisticated technique of applying his paints.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“The difficulty of painting these “impossible things”—of capturing not only the fleeting shadows and surface reflections but also the murky, half-hidden depths of trembling vegetation—was one of the things that drove Monet to despair.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Monet himself was an acknowledged master of these sorts of waterscapes: Édouard Manet once called him the “Raphael of water.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Monet’s anguish was caused more than anything by his attempt to do something entirely new and different, indeed revolutionary. His own description of the project was typically laconic: “The crucial thing is the mirror of water whose appearance changes constantly with the reflections from the sky.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Some of Monet’s friends regarded his torture and suffering as a necessary condition of his genius—as a symptom of his search for perfection, or what Geffroy called the “dream of form and color” that he pursued “almost to the point of self-annihilation.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

“Many people think I paint easily, but it is not an easy thing to be an artist. I often suffer tortures when I paint. It is a great joy and a great suffering.”
― Ross King, Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies