Monet’s last portrait of Camille

In the first days of September 1879, in a rented house at Vetheuil, forty miles down the Seine from Paris, Camille Monet was dying. She was thirty-two. Her husband was thirty-eight, famous inside the small circle that mattered and broke in every other one. There was barely money for the house and twelve people living in it: Monet, Camille, their two sons, and the family of Ernest Hoschede, the department-store owner who had once been Monet's most extravagant collector, until he went bankrupt in 1878 and his collection was auctioned off for almost nothing.

Camille had modelled for the paintings that made Monet's name. She is the woman in the green dress that got him into the Salon in 1866, and the figure with the parasol on the hill at Argenteuil. They had married in 1870, at a civil ceremony with Gustave Courbet as a witness, three years after the birth of their first son, Jean. The second, Michel, was eighteen months old when she received the last rites on 31 August 1879. She died on 5 September. Nobody is certain of what. The records say a pelvic illness, probably cancer.

Monet stood at the bed with a canvas. The painting he made is ninety centimetres tall and hangs today in the Musee d'Orsay: Camille under a veil of white, her face turned slightly, the sheets and the light dissolving into grey and violet and a strange wash of blue, the brushwork faster and looser than anything he had shown in public. In the bottom right corner, near the signature, there is a dark mark that the museum reads as a heart. The painting was never exhibited in his lifetime and never sold. It stayed with him.

Then, because it was 1879 and there was no money, he had a medallion redeemed from the Mont-de-Piete, the Paris pawnshop, so that it could be placed on Camille before she was buried. It was the only keepsake she had managed to hold on to through the years when everything else went to pay the rent.

Monet did not talk about that morning for decades. When he finally did, it was to Georges Clemenceau, the politician who became his closest friend in old age and who put the account in the book he wrote about Monet after his death. Standing at the bedside, Monet said, he had caught himself studying the colours on his wife's face: the blues, the yellows, the greys that death was laying down one after another. Before grief, before memory, before he had decided anything, his eye had already started working. He described the shock of it, and something close to shame.

It is the most quoted thing he ever said about himself, and it usually gets read as a confession of coldness. That reading is too easy. He was not choosing to paint instead of mourning. He was discovering that after twenty years of training an eye to notice nothing but light on surfaces, he no longer owned the switch. The eye did not care that the surface was his wife.

Three Sundays of this month have been about Monet's attention: a pond he painted for thirty years, haystacks he chased from dawn to dusk, a sunrise that named a movement. This is the other side of the same fact. Attention that intense is not a mood you switch on at the easel. It rebuilds the person who carries it, and it does not ask permission about where to point. The gift and the cost are one thing.

Alice Hoschede, who had nursed Camille through the last months, stayed. She raised the eight children of the two families, followed Monet to Giverny in 1883, and married him in 1892, the year after Ernest died. The water lilies, the Orangerie, the whole late career happened inside a household that began at that bedside in Vetheuil. Monet kept the painting of Camille for the rest of his life. It entered the Orsay in 1963, a gift from the dealer Katia Granoff, long after everyone in the house was gone.

Next Sunday, a new artist and a new month: Vienna, 1900, and the painter who bought his own work back from the state rather than let a committee decide what it meant.

Watch Claude Monet | A Curated Gallery for Reading & Relaxation

SEE · Musee d'Orsay, Paris, where Camille on her Deathbed hangs

Claude Monet, Camille on her Deathbed, 1879. Oil on canvas, 90 x 68 cm. Musee d'Orsay, Paris, gift of Katia Granoff, 1963. Public domain (artist died 1926); image via Wikimedia Commons.