--- title: Monet Offered France His Water Lilies the Day After the Armistice and Died Before Paris Saw Them description: Claude Monet died on 5th December 1926. The story of his Water Lilies gift to France, his cataracts and the centenary shows in Paris and at Tate Modern. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-07T20:05:12.198Z updated: 2026-11-07T20:05:12.212Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/monet-offered-france-his-water-lilies-the-day-after-the-armistice-and-died-before-paris-saw-them image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-29173987.webp categories: Art & Festivals content_type: Feature region: France, England publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Claude Monet description: French painter (1840 to 1926) and a founder of Impressionism, known for his series paintings and the Water Lilies cycle painted at his garden in Giverny. jobTitle: Painter sameAs: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet --- Claude Monet died at his house in Giverny on Sunday 5th December 1926, aged 86, most likely of lung cancer. At the funeral three days later, his friend Georges Clemenceau, the former prime minister, saw the plain black cloth over the coffin and pulled it away. 'No black for Monet,' he said. The painter went to the village churchyard under a cloth printed with flowers. Monet had given most of his last ten years to one project, and he did not live to see it open. If you have stood in the two oval rooms of the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, you have stood inside a space he planned to the last detail and never saw finished. ## Claude Monet's Water Lilies and the Armistice Gift In November 1918, the day after the Armistice, Monet wrote to Clemenceau to offer two of his large water lily panels to the nation. Clemenceau persuaded him to think bigger, and the gift grew into a whole cycle of paintings, the *Grandes Décorations*. Monet then set hard terms. In 1921 he turned down the Jeu de Paume, the space the government first proposed. He accepted the Orangerie in the Tuileries Garden on condition that the building was altered exactly as he required, and the agreement was signed in April 1922. The paintings went on show in 1927, a few months after his death, as eight compositions across twenty-two panels. The painter André Masson later called the rooms the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. ## Painting the Water Lilies Through Cataracts Doctors diagnosed cataracts in both of Monet's eyes in 1912. Over the following years colours lost their strength for him and reds turned muddy. He refused surgery for a decade. He had seen Honoré Daumier and Mary Cassatt lose their sight after cataract operations, and he would not risk it. Clemenceau, who had trained as a doctor, kept pressing him. In January 1923 Monet finally had his right eye operated on. The recovery was miserable: he had to lie still for days, and afterwards he saw the world tinted blue and needed glasses with coloured lenses. He destroyed some of the canvases he had painted with failing sight. Then he went back to the water lilies, and he kept painting almost until he died. When you look at the late paintings from Giverny, the hot reds and the dissolving forms are partly the record of what his eyes could still see. Many of those late studies stayed almost unknown until the 1950s. ## Claude Monet: A Life in Letters If you want Monet in his own words, Thames & Hudson has published *Claude Monet: A Life in Letters* for the centenary, at £30 for 552 pages. It gathers about 420 letters to 93 people, written between the ages of 18 and 86, chosen from more than 3,200 recorded letters and almost 400 that had never been catalogued. His most frequent correspondents were his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, and his second wife, Alice Hoschedé. ### Book: Claude Monet: A Life in Letters By Claude Monet About 420 letters written by Claude Monet to 93 correspondents between the ages of 18 and 86, published for the centenary of his death. The letters show the painter as a working artist with bills, quarrels and causes. In 1886, when Alice proposed that they separate, he wrote that he was 'so distraught, so desperately sad'. He also led the campaign that raised 20,000 francs to buy Manet's *Olympia* from Manet's widow for the French state, and the painting entered the Louvre in 1907. ## Monet, Painting Time at the Musée de l'Orangerie Paris marks the centenary with [Monet, Painting Time](https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/monet-painting-time) at the Orangerie, open until 25th January 2027. It brings together almost forty paintings, most of them from the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet, and follows how Monet tried to catch time itself: the hour, the season and the weather passing over the same haystack, cathedral or pond. Across Normandy and the Paris region, more than a hundred centenary events have run through the year, from Le Havre, where Monet grew up, to Giverny itself. ## Monet at Tate Modern Next Year You do not need to cross the Channel. The exhibition travels to London as [Monet: Painting Time at Tate Modern](https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/monet) from 25th February to 27th June 2027. It is the first exhibition Tate Modern has ever devoted to Monet, and adult tickets cost £26. Tickets are already on sale, so book early if you want a weekend slot. For another painter who worked to the very end, read our piece on [Vincent van Gogh's final brushstrokes](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/vincent-van-gogh-s-final-brushstrokes-a-tribute-to-resilience-and-the-power-of-art). ## Claude Monet: Your Questions **Q: Who was Claude Monet?** Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) was a French painter and a founder of Impressionism. The movement took its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise, shown in Paris in 1874. He is best known for his series paintings of haystacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral and the water lily pond at his garden in Giverny, where he lived from 1883 until his death. **Q: Where was Claude Monet born?** Claude Monet was born in Paris on 14th November 1840. His family moved to Le Havre in Normandy when he was a small child, and he grew up painting the Channel coast. He spent the second half of his life at Giverny, a village between Paris and Rouen, where his house and gardens are now open to visitors. **Q: Where can you see Monet's Water Lilies?** The largest water lily paintings are installed in two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, as Monet intended. The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris holds the biggest collection of his work, and individual Water Lilies canvases hang in museums around the world, including the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.