Death of Camille

Claude Monet, Camille Monet on her deathbed, 1879, Muse d'Orsay, Paris

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Muse d'Orsay

In 1876, Camille Monet became ill with tuberculosis. Their second son, Michel, was born on 17
March 1878. This second child weakened her already fading health. In the summer of that year,
the family moved to the village of Vtheuil where they shared a house with the family of Ernest
Hosched, a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts. In 1878, Camille Monet was
diagnosed with uterine cancer,[35][36][37] and she died on 5 September 1879 at the age of thirty-two.[38]
[39]

Monet made a study in oils of his dead wife. Many years later, Monet confessed to his
friend Georges Clemenceau that his need to analyse colours was both the joy and torment of his
life. He explained,
I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife's dead face and just systematically noting the
colours according to an automatic reflex!
John Berger describes the work as "a blizzard of white, grey, purplish paint ... a terrible blizzard
of loss which will forever efface her features. In fact there can be very few death-bed paintings
which have been so intensely felt or subjectively expressive." [40]

Vtheuil
After several difficult months following the death of Camille, Monet began to create some of his
best paintings of the 19th century. During the early 1880s, Monet painted several groups of
landscapes and seascapes in what he considered to be campaigns to document the French
countryside. These began to evolve into series of pictures in which he documented the same
scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.
Monet's friend Ernest Hosched became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium. After the death
of Camille Monet in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in
Vtheuil, Alice Hosched helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel. She took them to
Paris to live alongside her own six children,[41] Blanche (who married Jean Monet),
Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques. In the spring of 1880, Alice Hosched
and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet at Vtheuil. [42] In 1881, all of them moved
to Poissy, which Monet hated. In April 1883, looking out the window of the little train between
Vernon and Gasny, he discovered Giverny in Normandy.[41][43][44] Monet, Alice Hosched and the
children moved to Vernon, then to the house in Giverny, where he planted a large garden and
where he painted for much of the rest of his life. Following the death of her estranged husband,
Monet married Alice Hosched in 1892.[11]