The Man Who Painted Water Until He Went Blind (And Then Kept Painting)
Stubborn, obsessive, and prone to dramatic tantrums, Claude Monet was also the man who changed how the world sees light. Here's the life of a genius who destroyed his own paintings, built an impossible garden, and kept working even when he could barely see.
A Portrait of Claude Monet, As Told By Someone Who Probably Would Have Been Asked to Leave His Garden
Let me tell you something about Claude Monet: the man was impossible. Stubborn, obsessive, prone to dramatic despair, and utterly convinced that whatever he was working on was a disaster. He destroyed many of his own paintings. In 1908 he reportedly slashed a batch of water lily canvases rather than exhibit work he wasn't happy with. His dealer and friends begged him not to. He did it anyway.
And yet, against all odds, the paintings that survived are among the most beloved in human history. Go figure.
A Normandy Boy With Big Ideas
Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14 November 1840, but his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy when he was about five, and that's where the story really begins. The coast, the cliffs, the light bouncing off the water: it got into his bones early and never left. His whole life's work, if you squint, is one long love letter to the way light hits a wet surface.
His father wanted him to join the family grocery business. His mother died when he was sixteen. His aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, was an amateur painter and took the boy under her wing, which in hindsight was either the best or worst thing that ever happened to the Monet grocery business.
As a teenager, Claude sold caricatures in Le Havre. He was good at it: charming likenesses, a bit wicked, and popular enough to earn him real money. He later claimed to be embarrassed by this phase. We don't believe him.
Boudin, the Beach and a Life-Changing Nudge
The man who set Monet on his path was Eugène Boudin, a local landscape painter who persuaded the teenage Monet to paint en plein air: outdoors rather than in a cosy studio. Monet resisted. Monet complained. And then Monet painted outside and basically never stopped.
"If I became a painter," Monet later said, "I owe it to Eugène Boudin." High praise from a man famously stingy with it.
He moved to Paris and befriended Renoir, Sisley and Bazille, a group of young painters who would be sneered at by the art establishment and then, ironically, become the art establishment. He was poor, he was often rejected by the official Paris Salon, and he kept going anyway.
The Exhibition That Named a Movement (By Accident)
In 1874, Monet and his friends, fed up with the Salon's gatekeeping, organised their own independent exhibition. Monet showed Impression, Sunrise: a hazy, sketchy view of the port of Le Havre at dawn, all fog and orange light and a small boat you can barely make out.
A critic named Louis Leroy wrote a mocking review, using the title to coin the term "Impressionist" as an insult. Impression! Not even a finished painting!
The artists said: actually, yes. That's exactly what we are. Thank you. And that's how Impressionism got its name, from a man trying to be rude about it.
The Women He Loved
Monet's first great love was Camille Doncieux, who became his model, his companion and the mother of his two sons. They lived together for years before marrying in 1870, partly because Monet's family disapproved, and partly because Monet was perpetually broke.
He painted Camille constantly. Woman in a Green Dress (1866) made him briefly famous. Women in the Garden was rejected by the Salon. She appears walking in poppy fields, in the snow and, most famously, in Woman with a Parasol (1875), with their son Jean.
When Camille died in 1879, aged just 32, after a long illness, Monet was devastated. And then, in a moment he later confessed to with something like horror, he found himself studying the colours of her face. He painted her on her deathbed.
"I caught myself watching her tragic forehead," he later told his friend Georges Clemenceau, "almost automatically searching for the sequence of coloured gradations that death imposed on her motionless face."
He was horrified by himself. But he kept the painting.
Giverny, the Garden and the Obsession That Consumed Everything
In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny, a village in Normandy. He rented a house, then bought it in 1890. With him came Alice Hoschedé, wife of a bankrupt former patron, who had been running his household and raising their combined eight children. They married in 1892, after her husband's death. It was complicated. They made it work.
And then Monet built a garden. Not just any garden. The garden. He employed a team of gardeners. He filled his walls with Japanese woodblock prints and drew inspiration from them. He diverted a stream to create a water garden, built the Japanese bridge, planted weeping willows and grew water lilies, nymphéas, in extraordinary variety.
And then he painted it. For nearly thirty years.
He painted the lily pond in morning light and afternoon light, in autumn and summer, from different heights and distances. He returned to the same views obsessively, like a man trying to catch something that kept moving just out of frame. Because, of course, it was. Light never stops moving.
His neighbours weren't thrilled about the water garden; they worried his exotic plants would poison the water. Monet, never one for diplomacy, pushed ahead anyway.
The Cataracts, the Crisis and Painting Through the Dark
Around 1912, Monet noticed his vision changing. Colours looked muddy. Outlines blurred. He was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes, and over the following decade his sight deteriorated badly.
Another man might have stopped painting. Monet did not.
He painted from memory and instinct, relying on the labels on his paint tubes and the fixed order of colours on his palette. His work shifted: the luminous blues gave way to murkier reds, browns and yellows, the colours a cataract-clouded eye actually perceives.
In 1923, aged 82, he finally agreed to surgery on one eye. It partially restored his sight, and he was dismayed by some of what he'd painted in his worst years, reworking or destroying a number of canvases.
The Water Lilies, and a Final Gift to France
By 1914, Alice had died (1911) and so had his son Jean, and the First World War was breaking out across France. Monet was old, half-blind, grieving and lonely. He was also, characteristically, embarking on his most ambitious project yet.
He began a series of enormous water lily paintings, Les Nymphéas, and had a huge new studio built at Giverny to hold the giant canvases. He worked on them for over a decade.
The day after the Armistice in November 1918, he offered two of the panels to France as a gesture of peace. His old friend Georges Clemenceau, then Prime Minister, encouraged him to make it something bigger. Monet agreed, argued about it, threatened to pull out, changed his mind and finally committed to a full donation.
The paintings now live in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, installed in two oval rooms as Monet intended: a continuous panorama of water and light that surrounds you. You don't look at these paintings. You stand inside them.
He died at Giverny on 5 December 1926, aged 86. At his funeral, Clemenceau is said to have pulled away the black cloth covering his coffin and replaced it with a flowered one: "No black for Monet!"
A Few Things You Might Not Know
Monet took food extremely seriously. The yellow dining room at Giverny, where he entertained friends, was famous for its meals, and his household recipe notebooks still survive.
He loved irises as well as water lilies, and planted them in abundance. You can stitch his Irises.
He ordered plants obsessively, including rare varieties from Japan and specialist nurseries.
While painting his famous Poplars series along the river Epte, he discovered the trees were about to be sold and felled. So he paid the timber merchant to leave them standing until he'd finished painting them.
Why Any of This Still Matters
The funny thing about Monet is that he spent his whole life chasing something he could never quite pin down: the exact quality of light at a particular moment, on a particular surface, painted so the viewer feels the air as much as sees it. He failed, over and over, at the specific thing he was attempting. And in failing, in thousands of attempts to catch something fleeting, he made paintings that make people stop walking in museums and just stand there, not entirely sure why they feel the way they feel.
That's the trick, isn't it? You don't paint what a lily pond looks like. You paint what it feels like to be there on a still morning, when the water is so calm it could be the sky.
He figured that out. It took him about sixty years and a lot of destroyed canvases, but he got there.
Want more? Discover another painter who turned light and colour into emotion in The Starry Night, meet a painter who returned to the same sunlit scene in Raymond Wintz's Blue and Green Doors, or read Why Fine Art Is Becoming Cross Stitch's Most Beautiful Trend.
Capture Monet's light, one stitch at a time.
