Claude Monet

Claude Monet, blind French painter and last of the great Impressionists, recovered his eyesight after a surgical operation at which his oldest friend, Georges Clemenceau, stood at his side to cheer him. Monet, 83, has been blind for several years. It is not likely that he will paint another of the remarkable " series" which made him famous. But at least he has recovered, for himself, what he chiefly sought in art,— the pageant of moving light and air. Going out at dawn into a field near his Normandy home, he would paint a swift " impression" of its row of little haystacks under the light of early morning. Another day, he would paint the same stacks, through the heat-shimmer of high Normandy noon. Then he mould paint them at dusk, or half-hidden with rain, coated with snow, or red with the sunset. The musical expression, " Air, with variations," is true in many senses of Monet's greatest work. The famous series are exquisite color harmonies, —blurred if the observer stands too close, vivid and truthful if he steps back,—but not so much pictures of haystack or fields, as of the changing light and air which surround them. Monet was working, when his eyesight failed, on the last of his great series, the so-called Nympheas, 300 separate paintings of a single lily pond in his garden.