"[looking at the dead body of his first wife Camille, 5 Sept 1879], watching her tragic forehead, almost mechanically observing the colors which death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue. Blue, yellows, grey, what do I know?.. .How natural to 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 tot the shocks of colours. I just seem to be compelled in an unconsciousness activity, the one I engage in every day, like an animal turning in its mill."
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Quote in Monet's letter, September 1879; as cited in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 209
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Claude_Monet
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Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a French painter, and a leading artist in the French Impressionist art movement. Impressionism expresses one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" was derived from the title of Monet's painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative
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