If you are thinking of visiting London then...

If you are thinking of coming to London always Google 'Free Lectures'.  They take place all over the city  and usually draw  an interesting crowd.  Yesterday I went to one at the National Gallery given by an exuberant art academic  and I came away with my appreciation of Monet much enhanced beyond his love of water lilies and 'Impressionism'.

Claude Monet, 1899.

Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) 

As an impoverished artist in Paris, later he would become wealthy

enough to employ 7
gardeners Monet decided  with some other unknowns to hold an exhibition of their 'new' kind of painting.

One of the critics attending declared '...these paintings they are nothing but impressions.'  The rest is legend.

In his work, Monet was the great lover of light;  how it splayed on his subjects

so much so that he would repeatedly paint the same thing

Water Lillie's, Rouen Cathedral, at different times of the day.

But later in his life this lover of light would be challenged by the onset of cataracts.  As the condition worsened and the light he loved was being increasingly stolen from him by the cataracts he was repeatedly advised by friends and family to have 'the operation'.

But he steadfastly refused and railed against the doctors for not understanding his views on light, what 'real light' was. Monet's protests were so vocal that they became legendary, inspiring the following poem by Lisel Mueller

 

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolves

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

When he was 82 Monet finally had the operation for the removal of his cataracts. The operation was a great success!