Claude Monet

French-born father of Impressionism, Monet’s paintings play with light and colour to gorgeous effect, his mastery over landscape and portrait incredibly influential throughout the artistic world. How upset he must have been, then, when his vision began to fail him, rendering his ability to see what he was doing severely limited.

In the year 1914 he wrote that colours no longer looked the same. “Reds had begun to look muddy,” he said. “My painting was getting more and more darkened.” As his condition got worse, he began to suffer problems differentiating between colours.

It’s impossible to comprehend what this must have been like for Monet – a man who saw and documented the world in such a unique way to gradually lose his perception of reality.