Claude Monet is celebrated in a colourful new biography

ONCE, when Claude Monet was painting the cliffs at Étretat, he became so absorbed he failed to notice a wave until it crashed into him. He had to crawl from the sea on all fours. But this incident did nothing to dampen his ardour for water: it was the principal motif in over 1,000 of his paintings. It was there in his earliest known sketches from 1856 (when he was 15) and in his water-lilies series, created in the final years of his life and becoming more abstract as his eyesight failed.

Monet was a contradictory, difficult man. He abandoned his penniless muse, mistress and future wife, Camille, six weeks before she was due to give birth to his son, in order to visit other family and paint. But he was also capable of generosity and empathy. Friendships—most notably with Georges Clemenceau, France’s prime minister—endured for decades.