Mad Enchantment by Ross King

Author:Ross King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632860149
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Maurice Rollinat: “What a sad end!”

Rollinat’s death was not the only sad end that Monet forlornly contemplated as 1919 drew to a close. “As for me, my poor friend, I live in complete distress,” he wrote to Geffroy in the same letter in which he acknowledged the receipt of Fin d’Oeuvre. “Once again my sight is altered and I shall have to give up painting, and leave half-finished the work I have begun. What a sad end for me.”50

MONET WAS SOON confronted with a more immediate death: that of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Having suffered respiratory problems ever since catching pneumonia while painting outdoors with Paul Cézanne in the winter of 1881–82, Renoir came down with pneumonia again in December 1919. On December 3, in bed at his home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he called for a pencil so he could sketch some flowers at his bedside. Legend has him finishing the drawing (or sometimes a painting) and handing the pencil (or brush) back to his nurse while uttering his last words: “I think I am beginning to understand something about it.”51 He passed away soon afterward, at the age of seventy-eight.

The story is an appealing one that accords well with the image of the decrepit Renoir courageously continuing to paint despite his infirmities. It also appeals because of its implication that becoming a great artist takes time and patience—that it takes, indeed, an entire lifetime. The anecdote probably derived from the story about the French painter J.-A.-D. Ingres, who, a few days before his death in 1867 at the age of eighty-seven, took up a pencil and began making a sketch of a Holbein portrait. Asked what he was doing, he replied: “I’m learning.”52 The story may also have drawn on comments by the Japanese artist Hokusai, who in old age (he lived to eighty-nine) signed his works “The Old Man Mad About Painting.” “I have drawn things since I was six,” Hokusai supposedly reported. “All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true constructions of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred I shall certainly have reached a magnificent level. And when I am a hundred and ten, everything—every dot, every dash—will live.”53

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