Claude Monet wanted to be buried in a buoy. ‘This idea seemed to please him,’ his friend Gustave Geffroy wrote. ‘He laughed under his breath at the thought of being locked forever in this kind of invulnerable cork, dancing among the waves, braving storms, resting gently in the harmonious movements of calm weather, in the light of the sun.’ Tethered below the water, but bobbing on the surface like a necropolitan bud, this bizarre image would have the great Impressionist finally metamorphosing into the thing that had so dominated his later years: the water lily.
For an author who has taken on those titans of the Renaissance, Leonardo and Michelangelo, an ageing Claude Monet might seem an odd choice of subject. In his earlier years, however, Monet had made himself the interpreter of France and the French countryside, and as France again found itself at war with Germany and almost a million and a half Frenchmen went to their graves, the cantankerous, selfish, obsessive, gourmandising old egotist found himself the improbable symbol of the France and French culture that German barbarism was threatening.
This is the peg on which Ross King hangs the story of Monet’s last great fling as a painter and an obsession that began 20 years earlier when he bought his first water lilies from an enterprising botanist in Bordeaux.
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