Claude Monet, widely regarded as one of history's most precise colorists, may have gained the extraordinary ability to see ultraviolet light following cataract surgery in 1923, potentially allowing him to perceive colors in the same spectrum as bees and other insects. The French Impressionist master, who obsessively painted his famous pond and water lily scenes dozens of times to capture every nuance of shade and hue, experienced a dramatic transformation in his vision that opened up an entirely new phase of his artistic career.
Monet's journey toward this remarkable visual ability began in 1905 when he turned 65 and first noticed his previously perfect 20/20 eyesight becoming fuzzy. By 1912, his vision had deteriorated to an estimated 20/50 and continued declining steadily. The artist who had once been praised by Paul Cézanne as "only an eye—but my god, what an eye" was slowly losing the very sense that defined his artistic genius. By 1922, Monet's vision had plummeted to 20/200, legally blind, threatening to end the career of a man who declared that life without painting was no life at all.
The culprit behind Monet's declining vision was cataracts, a condition where proteins build up on the eye's lens, turning it yellow and blocking or scattering light. While cataracts commonly develop with age, some historians speculate that the lead-based paints Monet used throughout his career may have contributed to his condition. Like many patients facing a frightening diagnosis, Monet initially ignored the problem, hoping it would simply disappear on its own while he continued painting as much as possible.
As his condition worsened, Monet was forced to adapt his painting routine dramatically. The cataracts caused severe glare, requiring him to wear floppy straw hats when working outdoors. He could only paint during the gentlest light of dawn and dusk, abandoning the bright midday sessions that had once been his preference. His artistic output began showing the effects of his deteriorating vision, with fine, intricate brushstrokes giving way to coarse, thick applications of paint that lacked his signature light touch and airiness.
The impact on Monet's color perception proved particularly devastating for an artist renowned for his mastery of hue and shade. Cool colors like blues and greens became increasingly difficult to distinguish, causing his beloved water lilies to appear brownish and his tranquil ponds to resemble stagnant swamps. In a desperate attempt to compensate for the muted blues and greens, Monet began intensifying other colors, particularly fiery reds and yellows, transforming his peaceful garden scenes into what observers described as infernal landscapes reminiscent of his own private vision of hell.
By 1922, Monet's condition had become so severe that he could barely differentiate between certain colors. He was forced to label his paint tubes with large block letters and arrange them in the same position on his palette each day simply to locate the colors he needed. His desperation led him to consult doctors as far away as London, each of whom recommended cataract surgery—a procedure Monet consistently refused, having witnessed the tragic outcome of his friend and fellow artist Mary Cassatt's failed cataract surgeries in 1919, which effectively ended her painting career.
Eventually, with his artistic life hanging in the balance, Monet summoned the courage to undergo the risky procedure in January 1923. Surgeons operated on only one eye—most sources indicate it was his right eye—to preserve a backup in case complications arose. The recovery process proved as challenging as Monet had feared, requiring him to remain absolutely motionless for days with his head secured between heavy sandbags. For weeks afterward, he wore bandages around the operated eye that caused intense itching, leading him to claw at them incessantly.
The initial post-surgery results seemed to confirm Monet's worst fears about the procedure. When the bandages were finally removed, he was required to wear special glasses that distorted his vision like a funhouse mirror, creating what he described as a "terrifying ordeal." The artist lashed out at everyone around him, convinced that his career was over and that he had suffered the same fate as Mary Cassatt. However, unlike his unfortunate colleague, Monet's story would take a remarkable turn.
By 1924, Monet had received a new pair of specially crafted glasses designed for post-operative cataract patients. These expensive glasses—costing as much as a four-room luxury apartment—successfully restored his vision to near-normal function. But the surgery had created an unexpected side effect that would fundamentally change how Monet perceived the world around him. The removal of his natural lens had eliminated the filter that normally prevents humans from seeing ultraviolet light.
Unlike dogs, which cannot see red due to lacking the appropriate cone cells in their eyes, humans actually possess cone cells capable of detecting ultraviolet light. However, our natural lenses filter out these UV rays, making this portion of the spectrum invisible to us under normal circumstances. When Monet's cataract-affected lens was removed and not replaced with a UV-blocking artificial lens (a technology that didn't exist until the 1980s), this natural barrier was eliminated, potentially granting him access to the secret world of ultraviolet vision.
This expanded visual spectrum would have allowed Monet to perceive what scientists call "bee purple," the ultraviolet patterns that many flowers display to attract pollinating insects. Butterflies use ultraviolet spots on their wings to distinguish males from females, and flowers that appear plain to human eyes actually feature intricate ultraviolet stripes and swirls invisible to normal human vision. Evidence of Monet's potential UV perception appears in his post-surgery water lily paintings, where he began rendering the flowers with overtones of blue and purple that would be consistent with the violet aura these blooms display in ultraviolet light.
Monet's case is not unique in medical history. Even today, eye surgeons remove lenses from cataract patients, though they typically replace them with artificial lenses that block UV light. However, not all patients receive lens replacements, and those who don't often report being able to see previously invisible elements of their environment, such as the ultraviolet "black lights" that bartenders use to detect counterfeit currency—lights that appear intensely bright to lens-free individuals but remain largely invisible to people with intact natural lenses.
With his sight restored, Monet became highly critical of the paintings he had created during his cataract years, renouncing works that now appeared to him as featuring garish colors and coarse brushstrokes. Stories, possibly apocryphal, tell of the artist smuggling paint into galleries to secretly correct his displayed works when no one was watching. Other paintings from this period seemed beyond salvation to the perfectionist artist, and he reportedly destroyed several pieces with penknives in fits of rage, declaring that seeing them made him "seized by a frantic rage."
However, contemporary scholars have found significant value in Monet's cataract-period works, viewing them as important both scientifically and artistically. From a medical perspective, these paintings provide valuable data for vision scientists and eye doctors, offering unique insight into how people with cataracts perceive the world around them. Artistically, these works represent an inadvertent bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and 20th-century abstract expressionism, as Monet's distorted color perception and altered brushwork techniques aligned with the emerging artistic movements that deliberately used color in novel ways to create emotional rather than realistic representations. While Monet himself despised these works, art historians recognize them as an accidental but historically significant contribution to the evolution of modern art, demonstrating once again how history can pivot on the most unexpected circumstances.
