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.