Camille Monet sur son lit de mort

Camille, Monet's first wife, died in September 1879, only 32 years old, worn down by illness after their second child. Monet painted her where she lay. Years later he admitted something that troubled him about it. Sitting at the bedside of the woman he had loved and painted for years, he caught himself studying the blues and yellows that death was laying across her face, his eye working automatically, almost against his will. The picture shows exactly that. Camille dissolves into loose, pale strokes of lilac and grey, more weather than face, as if she were already turning into light and air. He kept the canvas but rarely spoke of it.