Painting Emotion: How Claude Monet Turned His Inner Life Into Art

During the overcast summer of 1879, in the riverside village of Vétheuil halfway between Paris and Rouen, a restless painter paced his garden, waiting for an hour’s sunshine. When the cloud lifted, he slipped through his gate bordering the Seine, made rapid sketches of the water and the reflections of its grassy islets, and returned home fast to be at his sick wife’s bedside. Camille “had been, and still was, very dear to me,” Monet said, but he was falling in love with someone else. Alice, hot-tempered, highly strung and married to one of Monet’s collectors, was close by. Bankruptcy had lost this once gilded couple their paintings, their Paris apartment and their country chateau, and they were sharing the Monets’ cramped terraced house. While devotedly nursing Camille, Alice became fascinated by Monet. Camille died on 5 September and Alice described her last day. “The poor woman suffered horribly, it was a long and terrible agony, and she remained conscious until the last minute. It was heartbreaking to see her say her sad goodbyes to her children.” Alice did not allow herself to relate what happened next. Monet seized a canvas and sketched his dead wife. “I found my eyes fixed on the tragic countenance, mechanically trying to seek the sequence, the degradation of the colours that death had just imposed on the motionless face. Shades of blue, yellow, grey, and I don’t know what… My automatic instinct was first to tremble at the shock of the colour.” Only a man of tremendous self-belief could hold his nerve while transforming his private, fleeting impressions…into defining, iconic images. But Camille Monet on Her Deathbed is about far more than the play of colors: the quick, coarse bluish-violet-white marks veiling the pallid face unfold Monet’s blizzard of grief. A torrent of slashing horizontal strokes rushes along the lower part of the canvas, as if submerging and carrying away the body. It is a portrait of Camille disappearing. Monet had made his reputation painting Camille. She features in fifty pictures, strolling in gardens, relaxing on a river embankment, windswept on the beach—images […]

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