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The following articles appeared in the September, October, and November issues of the Agudath Sholom Congregational Bulletin (with edits).
FULL NAME DATE OF BIRTH
About two months ago, I was diagnosed with a hernia. The
little rat reared its ugly head as Barb and I were wandering around Amsterdam
waiting to board the Viking ocean liner Neptune for our six-day
Norwegian cruise.
At first, I thought that twinge in my groin might be warning
me that a kidney stone was stirring – I’ve had five of them, though nothing
serious in ten years – but was quickly disabused of this notion by the
sensation of an intrusive bulge. As if
there was any doubt, my condition was confirmed by the unanimous verdict of our
two traveling companions, a husband-and-wife team comprised of a
gastroenterologist and a nurse, both retired.
“Don’t worry,” said Katy. “Chal’s had four. They’re easily
fixed.”
I've been gifted with remarkably good health for all my
seventy-eight years, having evaded both the surgeon’s knife and, much to the
amazement of the spate of providers who would interview me in the coming weeks,
the pharmacist’s palliatives. When my primary care physician saw my total
cholesterol number breach the sacred 200 level, he dutifully prescribed
statins; after consulting Dr. Google and weighing the pros and cons, I politely
declined.
While one should always strive to improve his odds – I try
to work out on an aerobic machine daily – survival to a ripe old age is less a
function of fitness than it is of sheer good luck. Who can say why my father
and sister succumbed to cancer in their sixties while my mother just celebrated
her 101st birthday?
With a blemish-free chart, I’m naturally skeptical of wading
into the health care morass that awaits every prospective patient. Inguinal
hernias are fairly common, especially for males over the age of fifty. The
likelihood of a life-threatening incarceration or strangulation appears to be
two percent or less.
On the other hand, while I’m able to walk at a rapid pace
with minimal discomfort, should the pain intensify, I must manually push the
protruding bowel into its protective cavity and hold it there. I’ve been forced
to eliminate a thirty-minute ride on an elliptical machine from my workout and
replace it with thirty additional minutes on a recumbent bicycle (bringing the
total to sixty).
I understand now that, unless I’m willing to alter my
lifestyle, my only remedy is surgery. But there’s a process. You can’t just
phone a friendly surgeon and schedule a consultation; you need a referral. I’m
one hundred percent certain I have a hernia, yet two gatekeepers stand between
me and the person who can really help me.
I’m on Medicare, so why should I care if all these providers want a share of the pot? But multiply my case by the thousands in a similar situation, and you can see why the United States spends $13,500 per capita annually for health care, more than twice the amount spent by its peer countries. Aside from my modest premium, I’m getting a free ride while millions of working Americans and taxpayers are bearing the burden of these outrageous costs.
On short notice, my primary care physician is not available,
so I’m redirected to Tara, a capable enough PA who apologizes for having to
examine my groin but does indeed confirm that I have a hernia. I’m assuming at
that point she’s going to refer me to a surgeon, but no: there’s more juice to
this squeeze. Just to reconfirm what she’s concluded, she informs me that an
ultrasound is protocol.
Having been down the ultrasound detour several years ago, I
should object, but once you’re swept into the health care funnel, it’s hard to
extricate yourself. It should be a sign that all the local laboratories are
booked, but I docilely acquiesce when the scheduling nurse secures an
appointment at Bedford Memorial Hospital, only minutes from my home in Forest.
You can’t enter a health care facility without multiple full
disclosures: Full Name, Date of Birth; Marc A. Schewel, 7/27/1948, which are
duly rendered to registrar and technician. If only the other stops on my
journey are as painless as this one. After performing the procedure, the
technician says she can’t really evaluate the image – that’s for the
radiologist to do – other than to say, guess what, “You have a hernia.”
A few days later I finally meet the second most important character in this drama: my surgeon, Dr. William K., or for simplification, Bill. Bill’s office is in the brand-new $100 million, 130,000 sq. ft. Centra Langhorne Medical Center. Dare I say, but this palace looks like it belongs on the Liberty University campus.
I don’t know how much
my operation is going to cost – why bother to ask – but it’s going to take a
lot to pay for this building, not to mention all the administrators and nurses
running around. It may not take long, as I found out last month when Barb was
having her hip replaced at the Surgery Center on Atherholt Road. “How many
operations are you doing here today?” I asked a nurse. “Forty-six,” she said,
“but we’re a little slow. Tomorrow, we have sixty scheduled.”
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Bill is a no-nonsense, “just the facts” kind of guy: Jack Webb with a whole lot less hair. Surrounded by three nurses and barely pausing to take a breath, he reviews the physiology of a hernia and the laparoscopic (robotic) procedure he recommends to repair it. I try to ask all the right questions, but I’m vastly outnumbered and all the evidence weighs heavily in favor of being proactive. My condition will worsen over time and steadily constrict my lifestyle. No surgery is without risk, but this type is minimally invasive and complications are rare.
Or, as my friend Dr. Walter B. astutely observed, “All
surgery is minor unless it’s on you.”
After three weeks of intense soul-searching and internet
surfing – briefly interrupted by a visit to the Vassar Medical Building on Oak
Lane for blood work – on Friday, July 31, promptly at 5:30 AM, accompanied by
Barb, I report to Lynchburg General Hospital. Raising my right hand, I solemnly
deliver my full name and date of birth and answer a rotisserie of questions
regarding the past and current state of my health, a regimen I will undergo at
least four more times before fading into oblivion.
Within minutes, Barb and I are escorted to a private pre-op
room, where I disrobe, don a medical gown, connect its tricky Velcro tabs, lie
down on a gurney, cover myself with a blanket, and try to relax. Any chance of
that soon dissipates when Dara shows up, re-interviews me, takes my blood
pressure (which is surprisingly normal), attaches a drip bag to my bed, applies
a tourniquet, feels for my vein, pricks me with a needle, and inserts an
intravenous tube. I compliment her on her gentle technique.
This is serious business, but at least someone here has a
since of humor. “Tell me your name,” says Henry as he rolls me down the hall.
When I answer, “Marc,” he breaks out into a broad grin. “You know better than
that,” he says. “I need your full name and date of birth. And what are you here
for? Beating your wife?” “Henry,” I say. “Look at me. Whom do you think is the injured
party?”
My next stop is a curtained alcove in a large staging area
full of commotion and chatter. Dr. Pete C., who replaced Barb’s hip, pokes his
head in to commiserate. When I hear not too far from me a patient, apparently
diabetic, describing his illnesses and medications, my trepidations shrink to
inconsequence.
Suddenly, there’s a flurry of activity in my tiny tent.
Lorraine rechecks my blood pressure and reinterrogates me. When she brandishes
an electric shaver and commences depilation, I realize there’s no turning back.
Bill stops by, says something like “How are you doing,” and leaves his first
mark (erasable, unlike the ones that follow) on my lower right abdomen. I’m not
sure what Zachary’s purpose is, but I suspect it’s related to anesthesiology.
Speaking of which, up pops a familiar face: Igor, the Ukrainian fellow who
helped spread mulch at the synagogue playground several months ago.
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“Igor, my friend. It’s so strange meeting you here. I never knew . . .”
Maybe it’s Zachary who’s whisking me along to my penultimate
destination, with Igor by my side. He wants to know when I last had anesthesia.
“About ten years ago, during a colonoscopy,” I say, at which point he tries to
convince me that it’s time for another, “as cancer can flare up at any time.”
“Igor,” I say, “I’m seventy-eight and I’m not interested. We can discuss this
later, after I regain consciousness.”
I’m wheeled into the operating room, where all eyes are on
me, like I’m the next victim. Two hefty fellows maneuver me onto the surgical
table; one places a plastic cone over my mouth and says, “I’m just going to
give you a little oxygen.” And that’s the last thing I remember.
Six days into my recovery, I’m not a happy camper. Either
Bill neglected to inform me, or I forgot that this surgery involved three
incisions – or bullet holes as a friend said – one to insert the camera, one to
repair the hernia and emplace the mesh, and one to examine the other side of my
abdomen. None of the three has healed completely, and the naval incision is
bruised and slightly swollen. My stomach remains distended from the gas that
was injected to facilitate the procedure. While most of my pain has moderated –
I stopped taking medication after twenty-four hours – I still have spasms at
the wound and mesh sites.
I’ve tried to make light of the situation with comments like
“Oh, how I miss my hernia” and “I hurt everywhere except where the hernia was.”
People who have been through this tell me that I need to be patient; healing
takes time. And while I’m cursing my pain, maybe I should reflect on how I
began this essay. I’m seventy-eight years old, still upright, still healthy,
and a whole lot better off than many of my contemporaries.
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“I guess we’re not going to Paris for my birthday,” Barb says to me on June 28th after I agree to an outing with some friends on July 23rd, which is the eve of her 75th birthday.
“We just got back from Norway,” is my response, “plus,
you’re only six days into your recovery from hip replacement.”
“For which your caregiving leaves a lot to be desired,” she
says, completing my sentence.
You can see where this conversation is going. I’ll spare you
the rest of the gory details, other than to quote what she told a friend: “I
bullied him into it.” Within twenty-four hours, we booked our flights, our
hotel, and her birthday excursion to Giverny, Claude Monet’s home in Normandy,
about an hour-and-a-half bus ride from Paris.
I knew Claude Monet as one of the founders of Impressionism,
but frankly had never heard of Giverny, the small town beside the Seine where
he purchased a house and its environs in 1883 at the age of forty. Barb says it
is a place she has always wanted to see, and after a few minutes, I know why.
It’s no exaggeration to say that entering these grounds is
like stepping into a Monet work of art. Immediately, you are immersed in a
landscape of vibrant color and peaceful contemplation as you explore the
gardens which for him were as much a labor of love as his painting.
From visits to his splendid estate at Montgeron, Monet was
familiar with the large, beautiful garden of Ernest Hoschede, his friend and patron,
and the husband of Alice, his second wife. He devoured gardening catalogues and
visited plant exhibitions and botanical gardens whenever possible. He grew
plants and tended plots at Argenteuil and Vetheuil where he was only renting
properties.
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After moving to Giverny, Monet immediately set about transforming the apple orchard and vegetable patch that blighted his view to the horizon. He removed the boxwood hedges and spruce trees that lined the sandy path to his house, retaining only two large yews at the entrance, and replaced them with metal archways that remain in place today. The area was laid out on a geometrical plan structured by single-color beds sitting side by side where flower clumps at different heights created volume.
Varying by month, the space is filled with an incredible mix
of flowers, from lilacs and irises (seventeen varieties) to chrysanthemums and
nasturtiums. Azaleas, hydrangeas, foxgloves, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots,
violets, poppies, tulips, peonies, and daffodils mingle and bloom one after
another. Roses scatter the ground, hide in bushes and hedges, and cling to
pergolas, pillars, trellises, and the house façade.
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The Clos Normand, the former orchard, was planted by Monet as a place in which to paint, an open-air studio. It also served as an image he could depict, as in The Artist’s Garden at Giverny, an almost abstract composition, saturated with color, marked by dark diagonals and verticals, and dabbed with mere suggestions of blooms. Monet liked to work in the surrounding countryside, painting haystacks and rows of poplars, and in his garden, he was as close as he could be to the colors and settings he loved.
In 1893 Monet bought a nearby piece of land which was
crossed by a branch of the Epte River, a tributary of the Seine. He dug a small
pond but only after obtaining permission from the prefecture of the department;
his neighbors had objected, fearing their water would be poisoned by Monet’s
exotic plants. In 1901 he purchased additional property and undertook an
extensive project to divert the stream further and enlarge the pond.
Inspired by tranquil scenes from the Japanese prints he
collected, Monet designed the Water Garden himself and built it with the help
of a team of gardeners.
As you emerge from the underpass which enables visitors to
avoid crossing a road, you are greeted by a second feast for the eyes. A
green-painted wooden footbridge overgrown with wisteria arches over an
irregularly shaped pond. The shore is lined with bamboo, willows, cherry
blossoms, gladioli, rhododendrons, and Japanese tree peonies. Winding paths
give fresh vistas at every bend. Hundreds of lilies float on the blue-green
water in contrasting shades of yellow, white, pink, red, and lilac. Passing
clouds, bursts of sunlight, and shadows of foliage are mirrored on the
shimmering surface.
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Two observers articulated the dual nature of this spot. Conceived initially as a picturesque subject, in the words of Georges Clemenceau, “Monet’s garden was one of his works, a realization of the charms of adapting nature to the work of the painter of light.” Marcel Proust, who never saw it, echoed that sentiment when he wrote, “The garden itself is a real transposition of art, rather than a model for painting.”
Beginning in 1899, Water Lilies became the theme that
occupied Monet for the next twenty years and would undergird his legacy. Experimenting
with variations in format, tone, and color, he developed a new, fluid, and
audacious style that narrowed the distinction between Impressionism and modern
abstraction. Ultimately, he would produce 250 of these paintings.
While hardly comparable to the gardens, Monet’s house offers
its own attractions, beginning with its pink walls, green shutters, and the
climbing vines and flowers that cloak the façade.
The first room you enter is Monet’s original studio, which he later
converted into a salon to entertain guests. The walls are covered with
reproductions of sixty paintings he personally selected and arranged in a manner
that represented his life and career. They include works from his difficult early
years; two of his wife Camille, one on a beach, one on her deathbed; samples
from his Haystacks and Cathedral series; several from his London
and Venice travels; and one of the circular Water Lilies murals.
The kitchen is a favorite among many visitors, with its
historic stovetop, gleaming copper pans and pitchers, and blue-and-white ceramic
tiles. Our guide informs us that Monet kept his distance from food preparation
and entrusted it all to his three cooks, Caroline, Melanie, and Marguerite.
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The dining room is spacious enough to accommodate the entire household when it sat down for lunch promptly at 12:30 PM: Monet, his two sons, Alice (his second wife), and her four daughters and two sons. The intense color scheme chosen by Monet could only have sprung from a painter’s palette: “light chrome yellow with moldings picked out in pure chrome yellow.” The table is set with one of the two dinner services used alternately in Monet’s time.
Entering Monet’s bedroom, instead of his own paintings, you encounter
“a veritable gallery of Impressionist art,” as described by a reporter in 1927.
Arranged according to size on walls draped with white cloth are thirty-seven reproductions
of famous works by Renoir, Cezanne, Boudin, Delacroix, and several others.
We leave the house with our appetite whetted for more Monet.
Later that day, back in Paris, we will visit the Musee d’Orsay, which houses
the finest Impressionist collection in the world, and the Musee de l’Orangerie where
Monet’s eight Water Lilies murals are hung. At the gift shop, I purchase
a biography, Monet: The Restless Vision by Jackie Wullschlager, to learn
more about this amazing man. Unless something better comes to mind, you’ll be
able to read about that next month.
A MOMENT OF BREAKING LIGHT
Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, into comfortable middle-class surroundings. Business concerns led his family’s relocation to coastal France, where as early as age fifteen, the distracted student was filling sketchbooks with drawings of the houses and flora of the town of Ingouville, scenes of the harbor at Le Havre, and caricatures of local notables.
Monet attributed the launch of his career as a landscape
painter to the naturalist Eugene Boudin, whom he met in Le Havre in 1857. Positioning
his easel next to Boudin en plein air, Monet later wrote that his “eyes,
finally, were opened” to nature. Boudin’s conviction that “anything painted
directly from nature and on the spot has always a force, power, and vivacity
that one cannot be found in the studio” would inform his protégé’s work.
(Wullschlager, pp. 29-30)
In 1865, Monet debuted at the Salon in Paris with two
seascapes he had painted at Honfleur on the estuary of the Seine near Le Havre.
The sight of them alongside Edouard Manet’s depiction of Olympia, a
reclining nude prostitute, inspired Monet to undertake a grandiose project in
the mode of Manet’s even more scandalous Le Bain, which featured a nude
female seated at a picnic beside two fully clothed men.
Composed of three rhythmically linked life-size couples, Monet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe achieved his aim of merging figures with setting and of presenting light as the action of the painting. He could not finish it in time for the 1866 Salon, and instead submitted The Woman in the Green Dress, or Camille, a stunning portrait of his eighteen-year-old girl friend, described as “a figure of verve and enigma . . .a fleeting presence . . . a moment of perfection.” (Wullschlager, pp. 87-88)
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Camille posed for all four of the Women in the Garden (1866) in which, painting entirely from nature, Monet used heightened contrasts between light and shadow to anticipate his movement towards Impressionism. Brutal contrasts of light and color are evident in his renowned work of 1867, Terrace at Sainte-Andresse, which coincided with the birth of Monet and Camille’s first child, Jean. The couple would marry three years later. (Wullschlager, pp. 99-100, 113)
Monet’s next great painting, La Grenouillere (1869), the frog pond, a bathing establishment on the banks of Croissy Island in the Seine, contained the elements that would determine the future of his art: the fusion of light, reflections, and movement on the river; water vividly revealed and abstracted; images decomposed in abrupt, accented brushstrokes. (Wullschlager, pp. 128-129)
He brought these elements to an apogee during his sojourn in
Argenteuil (1872-1876), a small town twelve miles from Paris overlooking the
Seine. Moving further “from defining forms in favor of lively marks, dots,
[and] bursts of color,” he created such notable works as The Basin at
Argenteuil, The Poppy Field (his most abstract so far), and Woman
with a Parasol. In the latter, Camille and Jean are captured
standing atop a grassy hill yet also given a sense of motion by floating wisps
of clouds and swaying sunflowers. (Wullschlager, pp. 150,151, 166)
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The “Societe anonyme” exhibitions failed to produce any remunerative sales. Monet enjoyed periods of refuge at the estate of his loyal patron, Ernest Hoschede, just outside Paris, until, desperate for money, he abandoned Argenteuil and Camille, who was suffering from a debilitating illness (probably uterine cancer), and moved to the city. There, from January to April 1877, he competed a dozen paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, “his first exploration of a single subject across multiple perspectives, times of day and season, and levels of sharpness and blur.” (Wullschlager, pp. 183-184)
Camille joined her husband in Paris for the birth of their
second son Michel in March 1878 and for the success of Rue Montorgueil,
an exuberant flag painting “of tricolors: fat staccato red, white, and blue
strokes fluttering, flapping, and twirling above narrow thronging streets.” It
sold instantly. (Wullschlager, p. 193)
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The family moved to the rural village of Vetheuil, thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. Monet loved the view across the river, and, during 1878-1879, painted sixty-eight canvases, including eight versions of The Seine at Lavacourt. Only eight overall were sold, a financial disaster for Monet which was compounded by Camille’s death on September 5, 1879. (Wullschlager, pp. 195-96, 204, 208)
Having neglected his clothing business, Ernest Hoschede
himself was close to bankruptcy. To save money, he and Monet combined
households, although the former spent most of his time in Paris. Ernest’s wife
Alice had nursed Camille during her illness, and after her death entered an
intimate relationship with Monet. While hard-edged and independent, Alice delighted
in nature; her eyes and spirit became vital for Monet in the sense that he saw
his work as a way of sharing his own vision and bringing her joy.
(Wullschlager, pp. 187, 195, 206, 228-229)
The appearance of Alice Hoschede in the Garden at the
seventh Impressionist exhibit in 1882 made the relationship public. In the
painting, as “the Seine glides past, the color contrasts of river, lawn, and
flowers are a foil for Alice who, resplendent in white, lights up the
landscape.” (Wullschlager, Plate 26)
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Leaving Alice and their eight children (his two and her six) in Poissy (a new residence a few miles upstream from Vetheuil), Monet spent most of the first half of 1882 in the deserted fishing village of Pourville, close to Dieppe. Working through storms, he produced one hundred canvases, which earned him 31,000 francs. A typical one in vibrant color is The Cliff Walk at Pourville, in which Alice and her daughter Suzanne look out over the rugged coastline to the bay. (Wullschlager, pp. 235-236)
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On April 5, 1883, seeking to separate himself entirely from Ernest Hoschede, Claude Monet stepped from a branch train off the Paris-Rouen rail line about an hour from the capital into the tiny village of Giverny, home to 279 people. A twelve-room (including cellar and attic) slate-roofed farmhouse, painted pink with grey shutters, and its adjacent barns, orchards, garden, and meadows were available for rent. Within a month he had transplanted his extended family. (Wullschlager, pp, 246-248)
Monet spent the winter and spring of 1884 in the medieval
town of Bordighera in northern Italy. He found a landscape which demanded
compositions denser, more jumbled, and brighter than he had done before. In The
Garden in Bordighera paintings, “fragments of the old town shimmer in
morning views of mixed colors cast by the rising sun.” (Wullschlager, pp. 254,
253)
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Back at Giverny, Monet undertook a new endeavor: “figures in the open air as I understand them, done as landscapes.” The subjects were his family. In In the Norvegienne (1887), his three stepdaughters – Germaine, Suzanne, and Blanche – more sculptural than real, cast deep reflections from their fishing boat, and “evoke the transience, the elusiveness, of the moment.” In Landscape with Figures (1888), five of the children – three in the foreground, two in the back – stand still and straight, “echoing the trees behind them . . . absorbed into the landscape by the dazzling light.” (Wullschlager, pp. 284, 293)
The first months of 1891 were a watershed for Monet. He was
now a homeowner, having purchased the Giverny property in November 1890. His
relationship with Alice would stabilize with the death of her husband Ernest in
March. And with the completion of twenty-five paintings in his Haystacks series,
he realized the concept that would shape his future work, bring him fame and
prosperity, and transform art history. (Wullschlager, pp. 303-306)
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“Monet had built landscapes on nuances of effect through the 1880’s,” but the Haystacks were a deliberate “moment-by-moment construction . . . paintings that were more about time rather than space.” As a series they “insist on the contemplation of each moment passing, of the transience of all moments . . . Painted in short staccato strokes that produced waves of color in multiple layers . . . burnished by golden rays or sprinkled with snow . . . [the Haystacks] embodied shelter, bounty, and nurture.” They were also a financial master stroke; Monet’s earnings for 1891 surpassed 100,000 francs. (Wullschlager, pp. 305-306, 308)
Two vertical series followed, the Poplars, which were
ubiquitous in Normandy and whose sturdy uprightness represented order,
well-being, and liberty, and the more difficult Rouen Cathedrals.
(Wullschlager, p. 313)
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He worked on several canvases at once, switching as the sun moved; the stone shifts from cold blue-gray at dawn to blazing gold at midday to dusty rose at sunset. He captures how lighting could impart different characters to the building depending on the time of day and the type of weather.
An interlude in London produced over one hundred versions of
the Houses of Parliament and the two bridges, Waterloo and Charing Cross; they
“change in appearance from hour to hour as winter mist mingles with smoke from
factories and furnaces” across the river. “Monet imagines the modern city as a
fleeting vista, its expansive skies, stretches of water, and ceaseless traffic
transformed into near abstractions, alternately opaque and translucent.” (Wullschlager,
pp. 350, 355)
With the Water Garden expansion completed by 1904, Monet
would devote his energy to his revolutionary Water Lillies series for
the rest of his life. “Nothing like this had existed in painting before: nature
rendered in the cropped, smallest fragment of a landscape, so that, wrote one
critic, ‘the lilies ‘appear to be floating in the moist air, fading away and
promoting the play of imagination.’ ’’(Wullschlager, p. 370)
“The basic element of the motif is the mirror of water,
whose appearance changes at every instant because of the way bits of the sky
are reflected in it, giving it life and movement,” explained Monet.
(Wullschlager, p. 370)
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Monet was severing his last ties with the descriptive painting. “Sky and earth mostly disappear, the banks and edges are eliminated, no single point fixes the eye, in these decentralized, water-flooded compositions.” (Wullschlager, pp. 370-371)
The series of 250 paintings culminated in the Grandes
Decorations, eight massive panels each two meters tall and between six and
seventeen meters in length; Monet worked on them from 1914 until his death in
1926 at the age of eighty-six. Conceived as a tribute to the French soldiers
who had perished during the First World War, at the behest of Georges
Clemenceau, Monet agreed to donate them to the Musee de L’Orangerie. But he
never completed them to his satisfaction.
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In 1927, the Water Lilies panels were delivered to the museum, where they languished in obscurity for decades, hardly visited or mentioned, relegated to a basement in a gloomy dark space. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, American Abstract Expressionists took a renewed interest in Monet’s work. As Monet’s reputation revived, the French minister of culture decided that his works now deserved a more prominent placement and sponsored a major renovation of L’Orangerie from 2000 to 2006. When it reopened, visitors would find Monet’s Grande Decorations displayed just as he had designed: in oval-shaped rooms, illuminated by natural light, and surrounded by water.
Today, thousands of visitors pass through its portals every
day to admire the master works of the man who, by fearlessly defying
conventional thinking and relentlessly pursuing his vision, can credibly be
deemed the father of modern art.
REFERENCES
Goetz, Adrian, trans. Barbara Mellor. Monet at Giverny.
Paris: Editions Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2015.
Wullschlager, Jackie. Monet: The Restless Vision. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.
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