Claude Monet painted his wife Camille on her deathbed in September 1879 because, by his own account, his eye began analyzing the colors death was putting on her face before he had decided to do anything. He told the story to his friend, the statesman Georges Clemenceau, as a confession.
Camille died on September 5, 1879, in Vétheuil, a Seine village northwest of Paris, at 32. She left two sons, the younger not yet two, and a nearly penniless husband.
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The confession survives on a single page, in a book Clemenceau published in 1928 about Monet's late paintings of the water lilies in his garden, two years after the painter's death. Camille's name is not on that page.
Monet first talks there about his endless struggle with color. Then he describes standing at the bedside of "a dead woman who had been, and still was, very dear to me."
The wish to keep her face was natural, he admits. What troubled him came first: his eye had already started on its own before that idea came. The account ends with a plea: Plaignez-moi, mon ami. "Pity me, my friend."
A crowded house in Vétheuil
That bedside stood in a crowded house. When Camille died, the Monets were sharing their small home in Vétheuil with Alice Hoschedé and her children, the family of a ruined collector who had once bought Monet's paintings…
What You'll Discover
What Clemenceau had just said to him.
Whether the dead woman is really Camille.
Where Monet hung the portrait.