Episode Details

Claude Monet spent his final decades painting through cataracts that progressively distorted his vision, turning the world into a blur of reds and browns. The late Water Lilies — now considered among the supreme achievements of Western art — were painted by a man who could barely see his canvas. Rather than stop, Monet adapted, and the paintings he produced while half-blind anticipated abstract expressionism by forty years.

This episode traces Monet from the plein-air experiments that launched Impressionism through the obsessive water garden at Giverny, the devastating cataracts, and the monumental late canvases that transformed his disability into visionary art.

• The painting of Impression, Sunrise and the hostile critical reception that named a movement
• The obsessive construction of the water garden at Giverny that became his final subject
• The cataracts that distorted his color perception and how they changed his palette
• The monumental Water Lilies panels and why they are now considered proto-abstract masterpieces