Camille Monet on Her Deathbed

Camille Monet on Her Deathbed is the portrait Claude Monet painted of his first wife, Camille Doncieux, in their house at Vétheuil on 5 September 1879, the day she died. She was thirty-two. The canvas, 90 by 68 centimeters, is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It is one of the most private paintings Monet ever made, and he kept it with him for the rest of his life.

Camille had been his model and companion since the mid-1860s. She is the woman in green in Camille (Woman in Green Dress), the figure on the hillside in Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, and the smiling blonde-wigged performer of La Japonaise. This is the last time he painted her.

What you are looking at

Camille lies with her head on a pillow, turned slightly to the left, her eyes closed and her mouth just open. A pale veil or shroud has been drawn around her face, and a small spray of flowers rests on her breast. The rest of the picture is barely there: bed linen, pillow and background are woven together out of fast, looping strokes of blue-grey, violet and white, so that the figure seems to sink into the surrounding paint.

There is almost no color in the usual sense. The palette is a cold scale of bluish whites, lilac and steely grey, warmed only by a faint yellow near the face and a few touches of rose in the flowers. The brushwork is extraordinary even for Monet. Strokes slash downward across the canvas like falling rain or snow, and they cover the body as though the painting itself were drawing a veil over her.

Look at the face, though, and the handling changes. Here the paint is smoother and more careful, and Monet records the slack cheeks, sunken eye sockets and thin lips of someone who had been ill for months. It is unsentimental and very close.

How it was made

Camille had been seriously ill since the birth of the couple's second son, Michel, in March 1878. The family, together with Alice Hoschedé and her six children, had moved to Vétheuil on the Seine that year, and money was scarce. The exact nature of Camille's illness is not known; suggestions in the literature include uterine cancer and complications after childbirth, but no diagnosis is documented with certainty.

Monet painted the portrait quickly, almost certainly within hours of her death, in the half-light of the room. That speed explains the open, unblended brushwork, and the light of an early autumn morning may explain the cold, silvery tonality.

What Monet said about it

Years later, Monet described the experience to his friend Georges Clemenceau. According to Clemenceau's recollection, published in his 1928 book on Monet, the painter confessed that while sitting by his dead wife he had caught himself automatically noting the shifting colors that death was bringing to her face: blues, yellows, greys. He described it as a kind of compulsion, a reflex of the eye he could not switch off, and he was disturbed by it.

That story is often quoted as evidence of a cold, purely optical temperament. Read alongside the painting, it suggests the opposite: grief expressed in the only language Monet fully trusted, which was looking.

Meaning and interpretation

Deathbed portraits have a long history in European art, from medieval tomb effigies to the posthumous portraits and photographs common in the nineteenth century. Monet's picture belongs to that tradition of remembrance but breaks with its conventions. There is no candle, no crucifix, no mourning figure, no attempt to make the dead look peaceful or beautiful.

Instead, critics and historians have read the swirling, veil-like strokes as a visual image of dissolution: the body passing out of the visible world. Some see in it a turning point in Monet's art. After 1879 his figure paintings become rarer, and he turns increasingly to landscape, to motifs painted again and again in changing light. Whether or not Camille's death caused that change, the portrait marks the end of the period when she was the human center of his work.

The years at Vétheuil

The painting belongs to the hardest period of Monet's life. At Vétheuil the two families, his own and that of the bankrupt collector Ernest Hoschedé, shared a rented house on the Seine. Monet wrote begging letters to friends and patrons, and Camille's care fell increasingly to Alice Hoschedé, who would later become Monet's second wife. The landscapes he painted there, including the frozen river of the winter after Camille's death, are among the bleakest in his work. Seen beside The Church in Vétheuil in Winter or the ice floe pictures of 1879–80, the deathbed portrait's icy palette looks less like an isolated experiment and more like the color of a whole season of grief.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and is periodically on display in the Impressionist galleries. It was not shown publicly during Monet's lifetime. For other works on mortality in the catalogue, see Death in Art and Memento Mori & Vanitas.