The Claude Monet Story

Monet wasn't as notable for Problems with Eyesight as people like Helen Keller or Louis Braille, but his condition still had an interesting effect on his work.

It wasn't until late in his life that he began to show signs of Cataracts, while he was under the care of his stepdaughter Blanche following the death of his second wife and his oldest son.

His vision gained a reddish tint, something common with Cataract victims. This is interesting because during this period in his life, many of his paintings made heavy use of reddish tones.

Cataracts are a common form of Eye Disease. They form when the lens of the eye becomes clouded over and the person's vision becomes Blurry and unreliable. These days, medical knowledge makes it easier to Protect Your Eyesight, and so things like Cataracts are mostly benign in that they can be easily removed in a process that only takes up to a few minutes at most.

This mostly just involves scraping away the damaged lens and replacing it with an artificial one, usually clearing its vision with no ill effects. Of course, this is only do to the advances made in the medical field. Years ago it wasn't so simple to just get rid of a condition like that, so numerous people dealt with Problems with Eyesight and weren't able to undergo a quick fix.

Prior to the onset of his cataracts, Claude Monet's paintings tended to lean toward shades of green, blue and white. While he wasn't officially diagnosed with the condition until he was 72, signs of the problem started much earlier.

At around 65 years old, his paintings gradually began to take on a much muddier look as his perception of color started to shift. The greens, blues and whites morphed into reds and yellows. During this time he often talked about perceiving most as pink and yellow, which is because nuclear cataracts absorb light, giving a dull, desaturated look to everything one can see.

As time went on, his condition started to grow worse and he began to go blind. First he was given eye drops to help clear up his vision. This proved effective at first, but eventually his declining vision became too much and he had no choice left but to undergo surgery.

In 1923, Claude Monet had the cataracts removed from one eye — he'd initially resisted because another painter he knew had a bad experience with the same Cataract Surgery, and he wasn't pleased with the results of the operation. The eye that hadn't been operated on was still cloudy and yellow even though the other could now see more clearly, and he refused to undergo the surgery a second time.

Because of this, he was never able to use the eyes together in an effective manner for the rest of his life. Instead, he adopted the use of corrective lenses so that he would at least be able to read, but still said that the distorted colors he could see were rather discomforting.

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Claude Monet to Facts About Eyesight

Claude Monet to Protect Your Eyesight