ART HISTORY
Tom Kizzia
The poppies along the tracks looked familiar. We had seen them at the museum, luminous daubs of reddish-orange pigment in meadows by the Seine where Claude Monet went on afternoon outings with his wife and children, and where a commuter train from the Gare Ste. Lazare was now taking my own gallant little family. The humid rail car was half-filled, mostly with tourists like us. My daughter, Emily, staring through glass at the Parisian sprawl, was fixed in some teen-aged mid-Atlantic space by the music piping through white earbuds. Ethan, four years younger, sat beside her in a bright blue France jersey, his nose in an English football magazine. The World Cup was getting underway that long-ago summer in Germany, and he was politely puzzled why, on his first trip abroad, he was taking a train to a painter’s garden instead of to a football stadium. His blond locks curled with sweat. Both kids, born and raised in a small cabin in Alaska, had suffered all week in the continental heat. We were hoping for relief when we reached the countryside, but so far had passed only miles of tile-roofed houses and shoebox apartments. Here and there, gray church spires rose above the suburbs like some protruding cultural bedrock. The car slowed at a station, my squinting efforts to summon a gauzy Impressionist landscape from the weeds undone by brick walls of graffiti, and the faint breeze died.
I folded my newspaper and fanned it to cool Ethan’s face, because that’s what Sally would have done.
Sally was the one who had planned an overnight trip to Monet’s home. She was the gardener in our family, the one who planted irises around the cabin and filled the roughcut window boxes with pansies. She was also, as it happened, the parent schooled in Impressionism and the proper names of reddish-orange pigments. She used to joke that her Art History degree had not been super-practical for her professional work as an organizer for environmental causes in Alaska. But her love for the New World’s wilderness had never erased a dream to visit Europe and see the great works she studied at school. We often talked about leaving the cabin for a year abroad once our kids were old enough.
Then one afternoon Sally felt unwell and lay down on the couch and did not get up. It happened that fast – four days later she was operated on for late-stage ovarian cancer. A rough few years followed, but then we hit a run with a lucky chemo drug and the dream stirred again. Gone were energy and motivation for chasing down famous landmarks. She was annoyed by a travel book proposing one thou-sand things to do before you die. “The point is to be, not to do,” she muttered, counting her days. Still, her one wish was time to watch her children grow into the world: Paris, prom, graduation. Round trip tickets to France appeared under the Christmas tree. And to indulge my desire to plan something especially for her, Sally asked to visit the gardens at Giverny, where one of her favorite artists lived out his late years, successful and beloved, surrounded by family and a panorama of irises and dahlias designed by his own painter’s eye.
A few months later, however, Sally emerged from the bedroom as I set dinner on the table, to tell the kids that her cancer was back and the trip would have to be postponed. Ethan jumped down from his chair and ran to her. Emily, our young thespian, rose wordlessly and removed the flight itinerary from under its refrigerator magnet.
And now we were in Paris without her. I was improvising, which I did a lot those first few years. Art projects with the kids had been one of Sally’s jobs, like cutting our hair or sorting out our feelings. I marched them through the museums, determined to show them the world through their mother’s eyes. But I’d hesitated to follow through with the overnight trip to Giverny. I told myself that a stroll through the famous gardens, so Hallmark-familiar from notecards and calendars, smacked of a pretty cliche, like the phrase “moving on with your life.”
Two things turned me around. One, I recalled words of the artist himself that I once taped to my computer terminal, back when I worked in a newsroom:
For me, the subject is of secondary importance. I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject. Claude Monet
I had been seeking inspiration not as a religious mystic but as a young writer eager to squeeze more feeling from every story. I re-moved the quote only when another reporter pointed out it might make our editors uneasy – accurate rendition of the subject being of primary importance on the police beat.
In the end it was the discovery of a simple keepsake in a box of Sally’s things that swept aside my condescension. The bookmark, distributed by a cancer advocacy group, was illustrated by one of Monet’s most famous paintings, Woman with a Parasol. A young woman stands with a boy in a sunny field. She gazes down from the shade be-neath her parasol, her face half-obscured by tendrils of veil and light and sky. The caption said Camille Monet, the artist’s first wife and mother of his two children, muse and model for so many of his early paintings, had died of ovarian cancer at age thirty-two.
* * *
The train started up and the air stirred again. In the Old World, we had learned, thirty-six degrees meant miserable heat wave. Our hotel in the Latin Quarter had offered refuge in a shady garden filled with the first-light fluting of birds. I rose alone the first morning and went to the courtyard for coffee. An elderly couple were crossing the cob-bled driveway. She was frail, leaning on an off-balance walker, diaphanously dressed in a chalk-white wrap and a floppy sunhat that couldn’t quite conceal the thin, patchy hair of a chemo patient. He shuffled behind, in pressed jeans and a sports jacket, pushing an empty wheelchair propped with a fresh pillow. The sight made me glad we hadn’t come to Paris when Sally was ailing. What kind of impression would that have left our children? The city of light-before-dark.
In its place, they were getting a city of cheap steaks, chocolate eclairs for breakfast, and big-screen World Cup matches – Dad’s Paris. On the train, Ethan shared the football magazine with his sister, a varsity forward for her high school soccer team. My one promise about the overnight trip to Giverny had been to find a big screen in a public place, so we could watch France play its opening match in the company of a cheering home crowd.
We had sprinted giddily through the Louvre, but lingered in some of the other art museums. I had cribbed for the trip with Sally’s college textbook, a fraying hardcover with her round schoolgirl signature inside the cover. In a passage about Renoir, she had circled the phrase “joie de vivre.” Scraping together the provisional expertise of a journalist, I skimmed this text and several biographies, reading that Monet was about light and color, not muzzy edges. “It’s terrible how the light runs out, taking color with it,” he told an art dealer. “Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at most. What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes? They’re gone, you have to stop. Ah, how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me. The pain it causes me!”
There were times, working our way through the Musee d’Orsay, when I could see it myself: how even the transient light of midday, a moment you hardly notice through a rustle of curtains, returns years later as a memory. A Monet painting of a snowy fence brought back long days of melting sunlight at the end of our first winter in the Alaska cabin. On a morning like that, Sally, big-bellied in the weeks before Emily’s birth, on her way to the springbox for water, had wobbled off the hard-packed trail and listed sideways into deep corn snow. She reached for my arm and said “Oops” and smiled with a plaintive tilt of her eyebrows. It was a look she could still summon, years later, on the morning of her final acupuncture appointment, after she had querulously refused help getting from the car. Thin and weak – how many more downward notches were on this volume knob? – she shuffled the few steps along the gravel path, stumbled, caught herself at the door, and glanced back with the same joking look in her eyes.
The railway out of Paris finally opened into wooded hills and farm fields. At the busy commercial town of Vernon we transferred onto an air-conditioned shuttle bus to cross the Seine. Monet’s moody subject was glassy and black, empty of the scattered reflections that set his landscapes shimmering. Ethan pointed out a jump built for wake-boarders.
Giverny, a small village of brick homes and flower trellises and some three hundred people, sees half a million tourists every year. As the day-trippers on our bus made straight for the walled gardens, we clattered our bags to the inn. A night at the auberge had been part of the trip Sally planned under our Christmas tree.
Our second-floor room had flowers in a painted window box and a view across the road toward poplar woods. Emily was delighted to have a bed in her own alcove. “Mom would have insisted on staying here longer,” she declared, bouncing on the mattress.
Ethan appeared less enthralled. A glance down the quiet ivy lane had revealed that Giverny was not the sort of place one might expect to find a sports bar with a big-screen TV.
* * *
The country village did seem just the sort of place, on the other hand, where a melancholy family might find salutary lessons in Nature, rebirth, and the consolations of Art. I thought I had a better idea, though, and led my children to a graveyard.
A forty-five-minute taxi ride across a riverbottom farmscape brought us to the town of Vetheuil. Perched above an oxbow of the Seine, Vetheuil looked bigger and less precious than Giverny, with narrow sidewalks and cars whipping down cobbled streets and an air of indifference toward visitors. We bought ice cream, then walked down a road leaving town to a small mustard-colored house where Monet lived before moving to Giverny. The years in Vetheuil were the hardest of his life. A plaque on the house said it was here that Monet’s wife, Camille Doncieux, died on 5 September 1879.
After finding that cancer bookmark of Sally’s, I had started searching the biography indexes for Vetheuil, my curiosity about Camille soon outstripping interest in the artist himself. There wasn’t a lot to learn; Monet’s high-born second wife, Alice, who reigned over the happy years at Giverny, received most of the historians’ attention (due in part to her own jealous pruning of early letters and photos). Camille had been a working-class girl, and was described vaguely as tall and pretty, with a model’s full figure, light-hearted and warm and tolerant of the priority her husband gave his art. She was eighteen when they met in Paris, fresh from the country and seven years younger than her student lover. For a decade they lived in deepening poverty, their civil marriage a secret from his family, moving through towns along the lower Seine in search of fresh scenery and cheaper rents. She appeared, by one count, on at least fifty-six canvases, as well as in works by their friends Renoir and Manet. “In the first pictures in which she appears, she is easily recognizable by the lick of hair that hangs down over her cheek,” wrote Monet’s cataloguer. The Lady in the Green Dress (1866), one of his first modest successes, shows her as somber; a decade later, in his hammy Japanese Woman, she is sparkling – and blonde! The young woman in the paintings is an assemblage of wistful features and shifting moods, often pensively oblivious to the color all around her. The soft focus was, I supposed, a hazard of being the model for an Impressionist. A subject of secondary importance.
Vetheuil, where the Monets moved after the birth of their second son, was the most affordable town yet. The artist described the area as “ravishing.” We drifted in the heat to a grassy park by the river, where Emily and Ethan made their way to the muddy bank. A swan paddled a V-line toward them, invoking our new family storyline, in which any solitary animal in the wild might fill suddenly with the spirit of their vigilant, nature-defending mother. While they con-versed with the swan, I looked back up toward Monet’s house and tried to fix the location of a masterpiece from those hard years, The Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil, which showed children descending steps through golden sunflowers and mottled blue shadows toward the Seine, perhaps to engage a swan of their own. Biographers disagree about whether Monet deleted signs of modernity from his scenes, or whether even to suggest such a thing was to miss what’s essential about the artist’s unflinching effort to record light as it fell on the what-is. In any event the artist’s garden was no longer there; a new house had interposed itself, and a road, undetectable in the paintings, was clearly visible.
I called Emily and Ethan away from the water and we hiked up from the floodplain through heavy humidity. Amber clouds were building picturesquely over the hills. Behind the quiet main street rose the thirteenth-century belltower of a Romanesque church, which juts above the town like a fortress in Monet’s paintings. Though indifferent to religion, he would row across the Seine to capture the village profile above the sky-dimpled river. In Vetheuil he was often gone from home, perfecting his open-air style, chasing weather and moody light obsessively but also desperately. Camille was ill and growing worse. At times he could not even afford pain medicine.
He had help, fortunately, though it would drive the gossips wild. Alice Hoschede, the wife of a bankrupt patron of Monet’s, had moved to Vetheuil with her six children to save money and help care for Camille. After the deaths of their spouses, Alice and Monet would marry, and the timeline of their evolving attachment remains unclear. Much about these painful years is simply lost, including the precise diagnosis of Camille’s fatal “longstanding disease of the womb.” Recent writing had settled on cancer, perhaps cervical or uterine if not ovarian, whose tumors would have spread painfully through her abdomen, accompanied by swelling fluids and a steady creeping gauntness, a squeezing of skeletal fingers.
One of Alice’s daughters recalled Camille gently stroking the girl’s hair, lying on a chaise lounge outdoors by the road where she could watch her sons play.
“The poor woman suffered greatly, her death was long and horrible, and she was conscious until the last minute,” Alice wrote in a letter. “It was heart-rending to see her bid a sad farewell to her children.” Her long illness had not prepared Monet. On the day Camille died,
he wrote, “I am shocked to find myself alone with two children.”
* * *
A loud cracking roll of thunder surprised us as we climbed the stone steps toward the Notre Dame de Vetheuil. Big gobs of rain smacked the dust in the church courtyard. The sky above remained blue and hazy with heat but a torrent opened from someplace unseen and we broke into a run. I thought it might be nicely on the nose to find shelter in an Old World church, but the iron gate was padlocked. We pressed our backs to the wall beneath a shallow arch to avoid the slashing rain. Then we dashed to a leafy tree nearby and waited there until the cloudburst passed.
A steep lane spilling with runoff led up to the gate of a small cemetery. The air was suddenly cooler – the long string of stifling sultry days, it turned out, was broken that afternoon by the passing line of thunderclouds. We made our way to a far corner looking out at the river valley. A wrought-iron cross waited inside a wet and glistening black-metal railing. The enclosure was filled with some sort of elegant shrub studded with tiny pink flowers.
We stood there quietly.
“I’m not exactly sure why I wanted to come here,” I began. I waited for my next sentence to appear.
We have no place like this for Sally, I thought – no graveside where we could go to remember and reflect, no pretty flowers to care for. When the time came, we had flown to a favorite camping spot at a high alpine lake and scattered Sally’s ashes in a waterfall. Given all her conservation work and our prayer-flag pantheism, it seemed right to say goodbye in Alaska’s wilderness. Now I wondered if it would have been better to leave her somewhere rather than everywhere. I was tongue-tied by my misgivings and the realization that this pilgrimage was probably teaching our children more about their father than their mother.
Emily stirred in the silence. “Mom would have liked coming here,” she said generously.
“She wasn’t a big one for slabs of marble,” I said. “She would have liked the pink flowers,” Emily said.
Camille Doncieux, wife of Claude Monet, said a faded marker. Though their marriage was consecrated on her deathbed by a priest, in this churchyard she kept the name of the working-class mistress. Maintenance of her grave was neglected in Monet’s lifetime, I’d learned, and not restored until a later Impressionist revival. Monet had moved on. Giverny was a second chance, his happy ending: remarried, rich and famous and working harder than ever, adored by children and step-children, he had sculpted his placid surroundings according to his own large-scale aesthetic ideal.
But he suffered to get there – that much I understood. Camille’s body lay in state for two days. Early in the morning of the second day, Monet became absorbed by the play of light and color on her face. He got out his easel and produced a canvas in which her shrouded body seems to sink into the pillows and bedsheets, the harsh gray strokes touched hopelessly by faint yellow daybreak. In a self-lacerating letter, Monet told of feeling possessed as he stared at “the shades and nuances of color Death brought to her countenance.” Shattered by the sight, he said, he went to work reflexively, “first and foremost devastated, organically, automatically, by the colors. Against my will, my reflexes took possession of me in an unconscious process, as the everyday course of my life took over. Like a draft animal working at the millstone. Pity me, my friend.”
When I saw a color plate of Camille Monet on Her Deathbed, the half-sketched face, cheeks sunken and lips drawn back in a grimace, seemed a betrayal – an act of callow genius, to remain behind and examine what was still alive in the space between him and his subject. At the Musee d’Orsay, I was relieved to learn the painting was in storage. It had remained privately in the family for nearly a century, until shortly before the death of their last surviving son, perhaps because it revealed more of both parents’ suffering than most children would want the world to see.
Monet’s pain is visible, as well, in the bleak paintings from the winter that followed Camille’s death. It was the coldest winter in local memory. The Seine froze, and Monet forced himself outdoors, hot-water bottles in his pockets, to capture the seized-up season, the dirty whites and pale greens and grays of a world where light had lost its strength. He was still at it when the river thawed and gave way violently, backing up behind ice dams and spilling over banks, drowning the lowlands like the floods that come to Alaska during breakup in spring. His pallid paintings of what newspapers were calling the debacle proved surprisingly popular. They started Monet on a run of prosperity that led him to Giverny, where the ice floes turned to water lilies.
Ethan had gone to explore among the marble tombstones, and Emily soon walked off to join him, leaving me alone by the black metal rail. I remembered how it felt to stand on that flat rock above the whitewater falls. Everything that morning had seemed so dewily, shiningly alive. Afterwards, I climbed away to take a photo. Emily and Ethan were perched above the falls on the sunny alpine tundra. Ethan was horsing around and suddenly his treasured baseball cap sailed into the cataract. Seized by unreasonable terror, I flew down the slope and splashed into a pool, just where the river plunged over another falls, and snatched back his cap before it floated into eternity.
* * *
That evening we took another long taxi ride to the railway town of Vernon, where our Portuguese driver found us a brasserie with pom-mes frites, a big TV screen and the hoped-for crowd of smoking, drinking, jeering Frenchmen. We got back to Giverny with plenty of light still in the sky and walked around for a while, the village quiet now, the tour buses gone.
The next morning, under high overcast, we were second in line at the garden gate. I hustled the kids downhill, through blooming rows of what Monet called his “tonal harmonies,” to the weeping willows. For twenty minutes, we had the water lily pond nearly to ourselves. Then a busload of Chinese tourists reached the Japanese bridge, and the contemplation of color and light required too much editing.
Our next stop beckoned: the ruins, farther down the river valley, of a castle built by Richard the Lionheart. An old friend from Paris met us in the crowded gift shop and we exited to his car through a motherlode of Impressionist posters and tea towels.
I had forgiven Monet the night before.
It was during our quiet walk after the France-Switzerland game. In creamy light, poplars swaying in the rush of a warm breeze, we had followed the deserted main street past shadowed gardens and half-timbered houses. At the unadorned village church, we paused briefly at the graves of Claude and Alice Monet (and Alice’s first husband!). Emily and Ethan then headed back to the inn, where they could watch Brazil in the evening’s final match on a small television in the room. They walked away holding hands.
Alone, I followed a random side lane uphill, past a small residential art institute ringing with the clatter of dinner dishes and the laughter of couples. There was a bench at the road’s end, and a foot-path wandering into woods that probably weren’t there in Monet’s time. The landscapes were more open back then. Evidently today’s rural population, busy commuting to Paris or selling Impressionist calendars, no longer cut firewood or unleashed herds of goats to chomp back the brush. I translated, roughly, a sign describing an environmental “restoration” project that aimed to return, through selective grazing, the famous pastoral look of the chalk hills.
To Alaskans steeped in environmental impact statements, these Old World landscapes seemed so carefully husbanded. Monet’s plan to tap a local tributary for his Japanese pond had been opposed at first by local farmers, on the grounds that exotic plants might poison cattle downstream. Later, though, he became a local hero for contributing funds to prevent construction of a factory. Even Monet, the painter of light falling on the what-is, worked hard in Giverny to control the tonal harmonies of his happy ending.
Sally the conservationist would surely have applauded his efforts. But Sally the cancer patient might have had a different perspective. I recalled an evening toward the end, when our house was filled with her family flown north to say goodbye. Ethan came home from a fishing trip that day with his first-ever king salmon. I lit the charcoal but was distracted by so many small household emergencies that the coals burned out before I could grill the fish. In the moment, it seemed such a tragedy. His first king salmon! And in the bedroom, my wife was dying! I went to Sally in tears, and she consoled me, her manner loving but already distant. “Control is a distraction from what is really going on,” she said.
I felt an urge, there in the woods above Giverny, to ask what Sally thought about the effort to control the appearance of the chalk hills – and found myself clinging gratefully to the sensation. At one time, I had started many such magical conversations, about politics or parenting dilemmas. These always ended abruptly, as I registered her absence anew. My life had been rich with grief. Now the impulse to turn and address her lingering presence came rarely. In the same way, items from our life, rediscovered – a misshapen red sweater on a back shelf; a trove of confidential mom-notes in Emily’s grade-school hand – had the power to burn like a wound. Uncovered and examined, their power faded. My landscape, by and large, was cleared of the dangers of such detonations. The terrible drama of life without Sally was mostly over. Pity me, my friend – I missed it.
I don’t know exactly how long I loitered there on the bench, lost in the fading glow of her schoolgirl joie de vivre, imagining the tonal harmonies of the future we’d planned. Then I saw the dusk was closing in. I let go and started down the hill, eager to rejoin my children before the game was over. The thing we’re moving toward, after all, is of secondary importance. It is the light in between that tells us we are still alive.
Tom Kizzia is the author of three non-fiction books: Pilgrim’s Wilderness (Crown, 2013), Cold Mountain Path (Porphyry Press, 2021), and The Wake of the Unseen Object (Henry Holt and University of Alaska Press, 1991 and 2020). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Anchorage Daily News, Columbia Journalism Review, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.