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Toward the end of his long and prolific career, Claude Monet, one of France’s masters of Impressionism, created his enchanting Water Lilies series, inspired by the water-lily pond he created at his beloved home in Giverny.

Monet’s intention for painting the luminous large-scale works was to provide an “asylum of peaceful meditation.” However, the calm and beauty of the paintings belie the personal turmoil, frustration, and anguish Monet endured in the last 15 years of his life: the deaths of his beloved wife Alice and eldest son Jean, the effects of increasingly cloudy vision, and the horrors of the First World War. Despite these travails, he turned to his art once again—and continued until his death in 1926.  

Author Ross King explores these celebrated paintings as he brings to life the extraordinary accomplishment of Monet’s later years.