Monet's Water Lilies: When a Blind Old Man Paints the Invisible
He can barely see. At seventy-five, Claude Monet is losing his sight.
By Artedusa
••15 min read
Monet's Water Lilies: When a Blind Old Man Paints the Invisible
He can barely see. At seventy-five, Claude Monet is losing his sight. Double cataracts blur everything, distort colors, reduce the world to fuzzy blotches. Doctors want to operate. He refuses. He's afraid of losing what remains, this deformed but still living perception that allows him to paint. So he continues. In his giant studio at Giverny, facing canvases as wide as walls, he paints water lilies. Nympheas. Water flowers floating on a pond he can barely distinguish anymore.
What he creates in this obstinate semi-blindness is stunning. The Water Lilies, this cycle of nearly three hundred paintings created between 1883 and 1926, constitute Impressionism's ultimate work and its radical transcendence. These are no longer paintings in the classical sense. They're environments, immersions, liquid meditations where subject dissolves into light and color. Monet no longer paints water lilies. He paints the sensation of being before water lilies. Or rather, being in the water with them, without top or bottom, without horizon, without markers.
And he does this almost blind, enraged against his body betraying him, against fleeting time, against war massacring a generation. The Water Lilies aren't pretty soothing images for dentist waiting rooms. They're silent screams, obsessions transformed into paint, the furious testament of a man who refuses to die without having captured the uncapturable.
Giverny, 1883: Paradise Built by Hand
In 1883, Monet discovers Giverny, a small Norman village wedged between the Seine and hills. He rents a house with a garden. Ten years later, he buys. He's finally financially successful. His paintings sell, American collectors fight over him, critics who despised him recognize his genius. At fifty-three, after decades of struggle, Monet is rich.
What does he do with this money? He creates a garden. Not just any garden. A garden conceived as a total work of art, a three-dimensional painting he obsessively shapes for over forty years. He buys neighboring lands, diverts a stream, digs a pond, plants willows, bamboos, wisteria. He brings water lilies from Japan, those giant nympheas with spectacular flowers.
Villagers are dismayed. This Parisian eccentric diverts water, plants exotic species, transforms the Norman landscape into a Japanese garden. The town council protests. Monet doesn't care. He does what he wants. He pays full-time gardeners to maintain his artificial paradise. Every morning, they clean the pond, remove dead leaves, position water lilies to create the perfect composition.
Because that's the secret. The Giverny garden isn't natural. It's a construction, a staging, a set. Monet doesn't paint nature. He paints his vision of nature, an idealized nature, purified, transformed into pure visual sensation. The water lily pond is a work of art before he even begins to paint it.
1914: War and Obsession
In August 1914, World War I breaks out. Monet is seventy-four. Too old to fight, but not old enough not to suffer. His son Michel is mobilized. His friends lose their children at the front. Every day, newspapers publish endless lists of dead. France bleeds.
And Monet paints water lilies.
He's criticized for being disconnected, selfish, indifferent to the massacre. How can he stay in his bourgeois garden in Giverny while millions of men die in the trenches' mud? Monet doesn't respond to critics. He paints. All day, every day. Water lilies, more water lilies, always water lilies.
It's not indifference. It's rage. Monet watches the world collapse. The European civilization he knew, with its certainties, its progress, its faith in reason, self-destructs in an orgy of industrialized violence. What can a seventy-four-year-old painter do about that? He paints. He creates beauty while everything goes up in smoke. It's his resistance, his way of saying no to chaos.
Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister, comes to see him at Giverny. The two men have been friends for forty years. Clemenceau, nicknamed "the Tiger," directs total war against Germany. His hands are covered with blood. And he tells Monet: "Continue. Paint. Give France something that survives this horror."
Monet promises. He'll create a monumental water lilies cycle he'll offer to the French State. An entire room, an immersive environment, a place of meditation and appeasement for a traumatized country. Clemenceau accepts. The project becomes official.
But Monet has a problem. He can barely see.
The Cataract: Painting While Going Blind
From 1912, Monet complains about his vision. Colors change. Blue becomes yellowish. Red turns brown. Contours blur. He consults doctors. Diagnosis: double cataract. Both eyes are affected. Without surgery, he'll become totally blind.
Monet refuses surgery. He's afraid. Cataract surgery in 1912 is risky, painful, with uncertain results. And he's heard stories. Painters operated on who never regain their color vision, who can't paint anymore afterward. He prefers to keep his failing vision than risk losing it completely.
So he adapts his painting. He knows his colors are false. That he's painting dirty yellow where there should be luminous blue. That he loads the paint, thickens touches, because he no longer distinguishes details. His paintings become increasingly abstract, increasingly violent chromatically.
Visitors coming to Giverny are shocked. They see immense canvases covered with violent reds, garish greens, aggressive yellows. These are no longer the soft, luminous impressions of 1870s Monet. It's something else. Something furious, hallucinated, almost expressionist.
Monet knows. He destroys dozens of paintings. He slashes them, burns them. He's haunted by the idea of leaving "false" works, deformed by his progressive blindness. But he also continues. Because he can't stop. Painting has become more than a profession, more than a passion. It's a vital necessity. If he stops, he dies.
In 1923, at eighty-three, he finally gives in and gets operated. The surgery is a semi-failure. He regains part of his vision, but colors remain distorted. He has to wear special glasses that make him look like a giant insect. He hates it. He continues painting, obsessively readjusting his canvases to correct "errors" made during the cataract years.
Some of the most radical, most abstract, most overwhelming Water Lilies works date from this period of near-blindness. As if losing sight had freed something in him. An interior vision, detached from reality, that anticipated 20th century abstract art.
The Orangerie, 1927: Posthumous Testament
Monet dies December 5, 1926 at Giverny. He's eighty-six. He painted until the last day, despite blindness, despite exhaustion, despite despair. His last gesture was to prevent his coffin being covered with a black cloth. "No black for Monet," ordered Clemenceau. They used flowered fabric.
Seven months later, in May 1927, the Water Lilies rooms open at the Orangerie museum in Paris. Two oval rooms, eight immense wall panels, nearly a hundred linear meters of painting. It's the realization of the project promised to Clemenceau in 1918. Monet's gift to France.
But Monet isn't there to see the result. He died convinced he'd failed, that the panels were unfinished, imperfect, botched. In his final years, he wanted to cancel everything, recover the canvases, redo them. Clemenceau had to beg him to let it happen, to trust.
When the rooms open, the public is puzzled. What is this? These aren't paintings you look at. They're environments you enter. The curved panels envelop the viewer. You can't see everything at once. You have to turn, walk, immerse yourself. It's disorienting, almost destabilizing.
And then there's no clear subject. No obvious composition. Just water, reflections, floating water lilies. No horizon. No sky. You don't know if you're looking at the water's surface or its depths. If these forms are flowers or cloud reflections. Everything mixes, everything dissolves in a continuous flow of green, blue, pink, violet.
Critics are mixed. Many find it confused, too abstract, not finished enough. Impressionism is outdated in 1927. Modern art is Picasso, Matisse, cubism, fauvism, surrealism. Monet's water lilies seem to belong to the past century, the testament of a bygone world.
It won't be until the 1950s that the Water Lilies' genius is truly recognized. When American abstract expressionists—Pollock, Rothko, Newman—discover these immense liquid panels that anticipated their own revolution. Monet hadn't painted Impressionism's swan song. He had invented abstraction before the abstractionists.
What Do We See in Water?
Approach a Water Lilies panel. Really close. A few centimeters from the canvas. What do you see? Paint. Thick streaks of color, laid with broad brush, sometimes with knife. Blue on green. Pink overflowing onto violet. White splatters. It resembles nothing. It's pure abstraction, gesture, matter.
Now step back. Stand three meters away. Magic operates. Streaks become reflections. Splatters, flowers. The chaos of colors resolves into coherent image. You see the pond, water lilies, light dancing on water.
That's Monet's genius. This capacity to construct a recognizable image with means that, up close, are purely abstract. He doesn't paint water lilies. He paints the visual sensation water lilies produce on our retina. And this sensation, seen up close, is organized chaos.
The Water Lilies have no horizon. No line separating sky from water. Everything is seen from above, in vertical dive. We look at the pond's surface like we'd look at an abstract painting hung on the wall. Sky exists only as reflection in water. Trees too. Everything is mirror, everything is illusion, everything is appearance.
This absence of horizon disorients. Our eyes instinctively seek a reference point, a stable line. They don't find it. So they float, drift, get lost in liquid infinity. That's exactly what Monet wanted. Create painting without anchor, without stability, that reproduces the sensation of vertigo facing still water.
Look at the reflections. Monet paints water so transparent you see through to the pond's muddy bottom. At the same time, you see clouds reflected on the surface. Depth and surface occupy the same pictorial plane. It's physically impossible. But it's perceptually accurate. When you look at water, you simultaneously see its surface and depth, reflections and bottom. Your brain synthesizes.
Monet paints this synthesis. He doesn't choose between surface and depth. He paints both simultaneously. That's what makes the Water Lilies so strange, so hypnotic. They capture a visual paradox that our eye resolves automatically but that classical painting, with its rational perspective, couldn't represent.
The Japanese Garden: Obsession with Artifice
Monet loved Japanese art. He collected ukiyo-e prints, those woodblock prints with vivid colors and audacious compositions. Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro covered the walls of his Giverny house. He understood something fundamental in this art: the Japanese didn't seek to imitate nature. They stylized it, simplified it, transformed it into decorative patterns.
The Giverny garden is an attempt to create a three-dimensional ukiyo-e. The Japanese bridge spanning the pond, drooping wisteria, bamboos, exotic water lilies—everything is borrowed from Japanese aesthetics. But it's a dreamed Japan, fantasized, reconstructed in Normandy by a painter who never set foot in Asia.
This artificiality didn't bother Monet. On the contrary. For him, all art was artifice. "Pure" nature doesn't exist for a painter. As soon as you set eyes on a landscape, you transform it, compose it, frame it. Might as well assume this transformation, push it to the extreme.
The Giverny garden was a work of art in the same way as the Water Lilies paintings. A three-dimensional painting Monet constantly modified. He had water lilies moved according to light, trees pruned to clear a view, flowers planted in precise chromatic combinations. Nothing was left to chance.
When he painted, he didn't copy the garden. He recreated it once more on canvas. Double transformation: from nature to garden, from garden to painting. Three levels of mediation, three levels of artifice. And yet, the result seems so natural, so immediate, so true.
That's Monet's ultimate paradox. He spent his life constructing, controlling, mastering every element of his subject. And the result gives the impression of total spontaneity, immediate freshness, nature seized on the spot. Perfect artifice passing itself off as nature.
2024: Why We Still Look at Water
Nearly a century after Monet's death, the Orangerie rooms remain full. Millions of visitors come each year to sit on benches and contemplate painted water. Why? What still fascinates in these old Impressionist paintings?
Perhaps because they create something rare: visual silence. In a world saturated with violent, aggressive images screaming to grab our attention, the Water Lilies whisper. They demand we slow down, stop, really look. You can't "consume" a four-meter water lily panel in three seconds. You have to sit, breathe, let the image permeate you.
The Water Lilies also create mental space outside time. When you're seated in the Orangerie's oval rooms, surrounded by these liquid panoramas without beginning or end, you lose your temporal markers. You float in an eternal present, a suspended moment where nothing happens and everything constantly changes with the light.
It's a form of meditation. Not in the religious sense, but neurologically. Your eyes drift over the painted surface without finding fixed anchor point. Your mind calms. You enter that floating state of consciousness psychologists call "flow."
Monet understood this intuitively. He created paintings to lose oneself. Not to tell a story, not to transmit a message, not to demonstrate technical virtuosity. Just to create a space where gaze can rest, where consciousness can appease.
Perhaps that's ultimately Monet's testament. Not a lesson about Impressionism or color or light. But an invitation. The invitation to slow down, to really look, to let yourself be absorbed by the useless and necessary beauty of water reflecting sky.
The Old Man and the Water
Last photos of Monet show him tiny, hunched, lost in his immense Giverny studio. Around him, gigantic canvases, three times taller than him, covered with water lilies. He wears his thick myopic glasses. He holds a brush almost as large as his arm. He can barely see, but he's still painting.
What was this obstinate old man seeking in his final months? What vision was he pursuing with this rage that refused to yield even facing blindness and imminent death?
Perhaps he sought to paint the invisible. To seize what, by definition, escapes representation. Light itself, not the objects it illuminates. Passing time, not the things that change. The instant that vanishes at the very moment we perceive it.
The last Water Lilies are almost abstract. They're no longer really water lily representations. They're chromatic meditations, harmonies of blues and greens and violets that evoke water without showing it directly. Monet, losing sight, had perhaps found another form of vision. An interior vision, detached from the real model, that anticipated all 20th century abstraction.
He died before seeing his work installed at the Orangerie. Before knowing that these paintings he judged botched would become one of Western art's summits. Before understanding he had exploded painting's limits, that he had shown a painting could be something other than a window on the world. That it could be an environment, an immersion, an experience.
The Water Lilies aren't paintings you look at. They're waters you dive into. Monet left us his pond, painted and repainted for forty years to the point of obsession. An impossible pond, artificial, created from scratch to be transformed into painting. A pond where water lilies float that are also color blotches, that are also optical illusions, that are also gates toward abstraction.
Look at the water. Get lost in reflections. Let your gaze float without anchor. That's what Monet wanted. That we stop seeking meaning, explanation, story. That we just accept being there, before painted water, in this instant suspended between seeing and dreaming.
The water lilies still float. And we, nearly a century later, still watch them, hypnotized by what this blind old man managed to capture: the unseizable instant when light touches water and transforms reality into pure vision.
Monet's Water Lilies: When a Blind Old Man Paints the Invisible | Art History
