Is there anything you can’t write about? ART FOR WRITERS

The dispassionate genius of the great artist: “I caught myself…searching for the succession, the arrangement of coloured graduations that death was imposing on her motionless face” Read on!

BRIDGET WHELAN writer

I’m guessing that most people have seen Claude Monet’s water lilies in his garden at Giverny, near Paris. He began painting them in 1899 and didn’t stop for the next 20 years. The images he created are on posters and make up bags, tableclothes and lighters. They have caught our collective imagination and their gentle colours have become part of our mental landscape.

This painting, however, comes from an earlier and darker period of his life. It is of Camille Monet and she has just died a slow, painful death from cancer having been ill for two years with tuberculosis.  It is 1879, she is 32 years old and leaves behind two small sons and a grief-stricken husband burdened with terrible financial problems.

And what does he do? He paints her and even as he does so, he’s horrified that he can be so detached.

“I caught myself…searching for the…

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