Camille Monet on her deathbed

Camille Monet on Her Deathbed was painted on 5 September 1879, the morning after Camille died at Vétheuil following a long illness, almost certainly aggravated by uterine cancer. Monet later described painting the canvas as an involuntary reflex: he found himself studying the colours spreading across her face — grays, yellows, blues — as an artist rather than a husband, and was horrified by this compulsion. The resulting canvas is among the most disturbing self-documents in the history of painting: the dead face of a thirty-two-year-old woman captured with the Impressionist concern for transient optical effect that reveals both Monet's consuming visual instinct and his grief.

Monet renders the dead face in a restricted palette of grey, ochre, and subdued yellow, the Impressionist broken brushwork applied to subject matter radically at odds with the outdoor leisure subjects that defined the movement. The handling is simultaneously tender and analytical, the features emerging from and dissolving into the surrounding bedclothes.