Claude Monet upended public opinion of what good art was well over a century ago. Monet had a different vision of the world. The world wasn’t just a real place to be captured by the artist’s brush. Monet’s courageous point of view saw the world as sacred, dynamic, connected, and full of light. To this day, Monet’s paintings move us because they capture much more than what the world is, they capture what the world means, and all of the beautiful possibility in it. We know Monet today as a great artist. But, his life was marked by incredible struggle. He faced periods of constant poverty, the crushing loss of his beloved wife, and at one point he attempted suicide. Later in his career, his eyesight began to fail. Yet, it was all of those painful experiences, and even his failing vision that shaped his point of view and enabled him to leave behind a legacy of artistic beauty.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Lisel Mueller’s captures this in an excerpt from her poem:

 

MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION

 

Doctor, you say there are no halos

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 the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are of 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,

illusions of three dimensional space,

 

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

 

I will not return to a universe

of object 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 at the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

 

to gasses. Doctor,

if you could only see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

 

Monet completed some of his finest work while his vision was failing. His point of view, informed by a life of profound struggle and an altered perspective due to his failing eyesight enabled him to produce art that captured France’s sorrow during World War I and helped bring healing to those who lived through it. In his collection of paintings of weeping willows produced between 1916-1919 he captured the heart of a mourning France and gave the nation’s tears a place to flow.

 

None of life’s experiences are wasted: the joy, the pain, the laughter, or the tears. All of these shape a person’s unique point of view. It takes courage to invite others to see the world through your eyes. But, by stepping out with confidence in your own vision you can be a person who brings hope, beauty, and wisdom into the lives of the people around you.