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 Georges Clemenceau as a confession.
Camille died on 5 September 1879 in Vétheuil, a village on the Seine, at 32. She left two sons, the younger not yet two, and a husband with almost no money.
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The confession comes from a single page, and Camille's name is not on it.
Clemenceau printed it in 1928, in his book on the water lilies, two years after Monet died. Monet tells him that color is the torment of his days. Then he describes standing at the bedside of "a dead woman who had been, and still was, very dear to me." Clemenceau does not say who she was.
What Monet says is stranger than the usual summary. The wish to record her face was natural, he admits. But before that idea came, his eye had already started on its own, hunting the blues, yellows and grays that death had laid on her temple. The account ends with a plea: Plaignez-moi, mon ami. "Pity me, my friend."
I do not read that as coldness. A cold man does not end a confession by asking to be pitied.
What You'll Discover
Who else was in the house.
What Clemenceau had just said to him.
Who the dead woman really is.
Where Monet hung the portrait.