Claude Monet died on 5 December 1926 at his home in Giverny, aged 86. Lung cancer is the cause most often given. One museum chronology is more careful: probably a tumour on the lung, together with pulmonary sclerosis.
An infection of the lungs had confined him to bed that year, and according to one medical history an X ray revealed the tumour. At the house with him was his oldest friend, Georges Clemenceau, the former prime minister of France.
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The cancer is not the part of the death that people remember. The coffin is.
Monet had asked to be buried like a decent man of the country, with no flower and no wreath. On 8 December, three days after he died, his coffin left the house under a black cloth.
Clemenceau looked at it and refused. "No! No black for Monet!" he said, and he pulled the cloth off the coffin. Black, French accounts have him add, is not a color.
A flowered cloth took its place, on the coffin of a man who had forbidden flowers. Where Clemenceau found it is the part of the story on which the accounts disagree.
Did Monet know he was dying?
Monet may well have known, whatever the doctors told him. Before the end he said to Clemenceau: "You will see all of this in the spring. I will no longer be here." The National Gallery of Victoria records the sentence in its timeline of the painter's life.
The diagnosis itself may have been kept from him. Hektoen International, a journal of medical history, writes that an X ray revealed the cancer in 1926 and that his family shielded him from it. I found no second source for that, and no statement from the family.
A catalogue published for the centenary of his death says Monet died at his house in Giverny, surrounded by his family and by Clemenceau. Three days later the village buried him, almost exactly as he had asked.
What You'll Discover
Who followed the coffin.
Where the flowered cloth came from.
How much he could still see.
What he never saw finished.