Monet's Cataracts: How Failing Eyesight Changed the Water Lilies

Put two of Monet's Japanese footbridges side by side and you'd swear two different painters made them. The 1899 version is cool and exact: a pale green arch, lilies laid flat on the water, willows hanging in soft blue shadow. The late ones are a tangle of rust, orange and mud-brown strokes where you have to hunt for the bridge. Between those two pictures sit Monet's cataracts, a decade of worsening sight, and one of the most argued-over eye operations in art history.

Here is the plain version of what happened, year by year, and what it did to the paintings. (If you only know him from the calm pond scenes, it helps to have Monet's paintings across his whole career in mind, because the late work only looks strange next to everything that came before.)

Two bridges, twenty years apart

Monet (1840–1926) spent his last 26 years painting the water garden he built at Giverny, about 250 canvases of it. The 1899 canvas in London is the before picture: greens, yellows and soft blues, every lily pad legible. The story of how he dug that pond and planted it is told in our walk through the Giverny garden; what matters here is that he kept painting the same few square yards while his eyes changed under him. That makes it close to a controlled experiment.

When were Monet's cataracts diagnosed?

Doctors diagnosed cataracts in both eyes in 1912, when Monet was in his early 70s. The clouding was the slow, age-related kind that turns the lens yellow and then brown. In 1913 he went to London to see Richard Liebreich, the chair of ophthalmology at St Thomas' Hospital and an eye doctor with a keen interest in art. Liebreich gave him new glasses and advised surgery on the right eye. Monet said no.

By 1922 the right eye could make out light and little else. The left measured 6/60, which Americans would write as 20/200: legally blind in his better eye. His new surgeon, Charles Coutela, tried dilating drops first to let more light past the lens, and for about a week Monet was thrilled. It didn't last.

What the cataracts did to his colors

A yellow-brown lens works like a tinted filter. It soaks up blue and violet, dulls reds, and makes the whole world look warmer and murkier. Monet described it himself in 1914–1915: "colours no longer had the same intensity for me… reds had begun to look muddy… my painting was getting more and more darkened."

He adapted the way a pilot flies on instruments. He labeled his paint tubes and kept his palette in a fixed order so he could find a color he couldn't really see. Bright sun blinded him, so he painted under a big straw hat. His brushstrokes grew broader, and the canvases turned the same brownish color as the lenses in his eyes.

In 2006 the ophthalmologist Michael Marmor ran the paintings through filters built to match Monet's lenses, and the simulation he published is the clearest picture we have of what Monet saw. With the moderate cataract of around 1915, everything took on a yellowish cast and fine color differences faded. With the severe cataract of 1922, two versions of the Japanese bridge, one strikingly orange and one strikingly blue, looked almost identical to him: a murky yellow-green. He couldn't tell his own color choices apart.

The worst of those late bridges belong to the Musée Marmottan in Paris, which became Monet's heir through his son Michel in 1966 and is the only place holding the last Japanese Bridge pictures.

The 1923 operation, and the glasses that followed

Monet was frightened of surgery for a reason: Honoré Daumier and Mary Cassatt had both had cataract operations that went badly. His friend Georges Clemenceau, a physician before he was prime minister, kept pushing. In the winter of 1921 Monet wrote that he would "paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf."

He gave in. In January 1923 Coutela began operating on the right eye, in two stages: first removing a small piece of the iris, then extracting the clouded lens. Afterward Monet had to lie flat for ten days with sandbags beside him, and he was a terrible patient. In July the membrane behind the lens clouded over and Coutela opened it in a third, minor procedure at Giverny. Monet's thanks came in a letter: "It is to my great chagrin that I regret having had this fatal operation."

The real trouble came next. With no lens in that eye, he needed thick aphakic glasses, and they bent straight lines and threw his color balance the other way. For more than a year the world looked either too yellow or too blue, and blue won: he complained of cyanopsia, a bluish tint over everything. In 1924 a third specialist, Jacques Mawas, fitted him with tinted Zeiss lenses and eventually blacked out the left lens so only the operated eye did the seeing. The long account of those fittings reads like a comedy of wrong prescriptions.

By 1925 the right eye tested at 6/9, close to normal, and he went back to work.

Did the surgery change the Water Lilies?

Yes, and you can see the change if you know where to look. Once he could see true color again, Monet was appalled by some of his recent canvases and destroyed several of them. He retouched others. His post-surgery pictures drop the garish oranges and coarse handling and go back to the gentle blues and greens of the pond scenes he'd painted before 1914.

That matters most for the big Water Lilies panels he was finishing at the time. He had promised them to France on November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice, and spent his final years reworking them. Monet died on December 5, 1926. A few months later the eight compositions in two oval rooms opened at the Orangerie in Paris, in 1927. So the most famous water lilies in the world were finished by a man who had just recovered his sight, after years of painting them through a brown filter.

Some art historians still read the rough late bridges as a deliberate move toward abstraction. The evidence points the other way. When the cataracts went, so did that style, which is hard to square with a planned change of direction. The late look came from his eyes. The irony is that those accidental canvases are the ones people now point to as the link between Impressionism and modern abstract art. For the earlier, deliberate experiments, like the 1872 harbor at dawn that named Impressionism, see how Monet started the movement.

A pond that stays green

If the clear-eyed Monet is the one you'd want to live with, the pond pictures and garden scenes like the garden he painted at Vétheuil are the ones to start with. Our studio paints every Monet in the collection by hand in oil on canvas, and it sits alongside the masterpieces people ask to own most if you'd like to compare him with other painters.

Sources

• British Journal of General Practice: Monet and cataract surgery
• Archives of Ophthalmology: simulation of Monet's cataracts
• The Ophthalmologist: The Cataracts of Claude Monet
• Hektoen International: Monet and his cataracts
• Musée de l'Orangerie: the Water Lilies
• Musée Marmottan Monet: the Monet collection
• National Gallery: The Water-Lily Pond, 1899