First, With the Last

“One day, when I found myself next to a woman’s deathbed, a woman who has been and still is very dear to me, I realised at the sight of her tragic brow how I mechanically analysed the progression of the tones that death gave her motionless face.” Claude Monet directed these words to his friend, Georges Clemenceau, and continued: “Blue tones, yellow, grey – what else? This is the point I had reached. It certainly felt natural to reproduce the last impression of a woman who was disappearing forever. But, even before I had got the idea to set down the facial features to which I was so deeply attached, my organism responded automatically to the colour signals and my reflexes took control in an unconscious act that has always characterised my daily life.” The dying person was the artist’s wife, Camille-Leonie Doncieux Monet, who died at 32 years old, probably as a result of cervical cancer. Camille and Claude had married in a civil ceremony in 1870. Their son, Jean, was born illegitimately in 1867 and Michel shortly before Camille’s death. At the vigil, a Catholic marriage ceremony was held on 31 August 1879, all to allow Camille to take part in the last anointing sacrament. She died on 5 September 1879, and was buried in the cemetery in Vetheuil. In 1878, Monet had moved his family to Vetheuil, a bucolic place on the Seine, west of Paris, to live with Alice and Ernest Hoschedé and their six children. The department store magnate and Monet’s patron, Ernest Hoschedé, had gone bankrupt the previous year. This was a temporarily formed, large family on the run from financial difficulties. Ernest was mostly absent, a missing entirely overshadowed by that it had to wait for a great sadness. Through the marriage to Claude, Camille had been given the last rites, and her dead body was treated with the prescribed reverence. Two days before the funeral came the veilléemortuaire, where the wake watched, nursed and cared for the corpse. ”My grown-up daughters,” wrote Alice Hoschedé (who would later marry Claude), ”have been very brave and kind-hearted; they have helped me with all of the last duties and watched for two days over the poor dead woman.”

A long time elapsed before Monet commented on his moments by the woman’s deathbed. Memory is certainly not always a reliable companion. Did the mourning process only begin when he reflexively observed the colour changes of death? He talks about the power of habit that took over, the ability to turn on the autopilot and thus seemingly be able to cope with difficult things without any conscious thought at all. But it seems to be that the millwheel’s curse This translates strangely. Not really sure of what the meaning is here. I think it is referring to the artistic instinct Monet has to observe colour, but which is missing from the above quotation.This translates strangely. Not really sure of what the meaning is here. I think it is referring to the artistic instinct Monet has to observe colour, but which is missing from the above quotation.may equally be a stable foundation for mastery. With the right of masters, Monet talks specifically about a meticulous routine as a prerequisite for sustained observation. It cannot be ruled out that because he, at the time of his correspondence with Clemenceau, suffered from cataracts, it had made him constantly aware of his difficulties in colour perception. It may here be worth recalling a desire for a ‘total liberation’, which he expressed to Clemenceau: he wished that he could have been born blind, and then by magic be sighted so that he could paint without interference from past experiences. He wanted to free himself from any form of influence that interfered with his ability to absorb the light sensations from the world around him. How could this be done in colour? Quite simply by avoiding context, i.e., to respond to each colour stimulus almost completely freed from its surroundings. But the task is difficult when the visual system is simultaneously looking for context. When Monet installed himself beside Camille’s deathbed with his tools and a canvas measuring 90 x 68 cm, he could hardly keep emotions in check; nor could he when, for the remainder of his long life, he saw the image of his first wife who was destroyed by cancer; it was constantly with him. One could easily be led to the notion that Monet painted in a trance. In fact, he prepared himself thoroughly and started his work while Camille was washed and prepared for the wake. We do not know how the room was decorated. But what is known is that Camille was being prepared for her departure according to church conventions. The bed linen was certainly carefully presented. A crucifix and a candle may have been on-hand. We may also assume that Claude was working in parallel with the others doing the ritual caring, which allowed a mental state of calm. Convention allows the good and purified dead to be lifted to heaven with Mary’s name on their lips. Death is a peaceful transfiguration through the divine light. The best death is not the fast liberation from suffering, but that which is prepared for through insight and the last rites. The pastoral death was central to Catholic teaching, the horrors and torments of hell toned down. Death was as touching and beautiful as nature itself. It was no longer associated with sadness, but with a raised beauty. Traces of suffering were eliminated to instead behold the dying in a peaceful state of sleep – an image of eternal peace. Not so in Monet’s painting, albeit that the remaining space for interpretation certainly can allow ideas related to traditional deathbed iconography, and there are examples of this in the extensive Monet literature. We read that Claude, through his brushstrokes, lifts Camille to the light, and thus brings the hope of a divine presence; or that this expresses the impotence of contrition. Monet has completely renounced the resurrection perspective, with every sacred hint. Camille is viewed frontally, and from above. Her torso and head is turned to one side, asymmetric with a strong confrontational effect and without iconic severity. Monet stands leaning over his wife’s facial features that are being changed by death. He lets her image lose its spatiality to instead lift the brush strokes from the clean canvas. He veils her face with blue diagonal lines with yellow, pink and orange highlights.

This is not an image intended for the contemplation of a woman in eternal sleep, beautiful in death. Her face is thin and devastated, her jaw tied but the lips open, making the contrast between the closed eyes and the frozen, open mouth even more profound in this meditation on loss and grief. The light covers the face, one of her eyelids shaded; what we see is the open mouth that will never speak. Monet had painted the end of his wife’s existence and refused to idealise her stricken face and body, or to recreate her image outside of time as a glorified form of bliss. The floral riches that surrounded Camille in his many earlier pictures of her have been reduced to a bouquet of dried flowers, the bouquet placed in her hands during the wake. Claude had broken with convention bound by Catholic rite. He had relied on his painting as a way to process his grief from his non-denominational standpoint. He must have done this while Alice Hoschedé and her daughters simultaneously followed their Catholic duties with prayers for Camille’s safe departure.