Monet [was] transfixed by the rapidly changing appearance of his wife’s face, ‘watching her tragic forehead, almost mechanically observing the colours which death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue, yellow, grey, what do I know? I had come to this,’ he told friends. ‘How natural, to want to reproduce the last image of her, who was leaving us for ever. But even before the idea came to me to record her beloved features, something in me automatically responded to the shocks of colour. I just seemed to be compelled in an unconscious activity, the one I engage in every day, like an animal turning in its mill.’

^{*From Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists, which I’m reading in honor of the show at SAM}

^{Impression: Sunrise (1873).}