Painters affected by eye diseases

Visual arts, by definition, require the gaze. The gaze of the viewer, once the work is completed, but also the gaze of the creator in action. Here are five artists affected by eye diseases who managed to overcome their disability to continue painting.

Claude Monet: artistic obscurity

“Three days ago, when I started working, I was horrified to discover that I could no longer see anything with my right eye,” Claude Monet wrote to art critic Gustave Geoffroy in a letter dated July 26, 1912. The diagnosis: the painter was suffering from bilateral cataracts. The solution: surgery, which even his friend, President Georges Clemenceau, strongly recommended. The Impressionist finally gave in ten years later, but the operation was not without consequences. He saw double, and his eyes filtered certain colors. These anomalies certainly contributed to the warming of his palette and the blurring of clear forms under his brush. Proof of this can be found in the series „Maison vue du jardin aux roses” (1922-1924), a landscape saturated with red, orange, and yellow, in which the subject is barely distinguishable.

Vincent van Gogh: ocular jaundice

Like Monet, Vincent Van Gogh saw yellow, although more clearly and for other reasons. Some attribute this condition, called xanthopsia (from xanthós, yellow; ópsis, sight, in ancient Greek), to excessive consumption of absinthe, a factor that causes hallucinations and convulsions. Others blame santonin, a treatment prescribed for gastric disorders caused by “green fairy.” The third and final hypothesis: it is possible that during his hospitalizations to treat his epilepsy or dementia, Van Gogh ingested medications based on digitalis, a toxic plant that can cause a form of “ocular jaundice.” Without this visual impairment, he might not have created his famous paintings “Les Tournesols,” “La Maison jaune,” and “Le Semeur au soleil couchant.”

Camille Pissarro: the pirate’s eye

Dacryocystitis. This is an inflammation of the lacrimal sac. In Camille Pissarro’s case, it was chronic, and he suffered about ten attacks in the last twenty years of his life. “I am forced to rest, my right eye has become inflamed again,” he wrote on August 25, 1888. Four years later, the painter moved to Paris to be closer to Dr. Parenteau. The ophthalmologist performed multiple incisions and cauterizations, but without result. The pain always returned, preventing him from carrying out his daily activities. Condemned to wear an eye patch like a pirate over his swollen eye, Pissarro could no longer paint outdoors. The urban views he painted from the window of his last apartments are among the greatest achievements of his work.

Rembrandt, the king of selfies

We owe the Dutch painter a hundred self-portraits, some of which may reflect his own strabismus. This theory is controversial among the medical community. In 2004, neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone found, after carefully studying reproductions from the artist’s rational catalog, that his right eye on the canvas generally fixes the viewer, while his left eye tends to deviate outward. A team of American researchers rejected this diagnosis in 2013. Depending on the tilt of the head, the gaze is determined to change direction. It is a fact… and the reason why one of the painter-model’s pupils, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, sometimes seems to deviate from the field of vision. This effect is found in several studio paintings. However, not all of the master’s students could have had strabismus. Rembrandt’s strabismus could therefore be a simple matter of style.

Edgar Degas: the war blinded him

During the last thirty years of his life, Edgar Degas gradually lost his sight, a condition which, according to his friends, he attributed to the war and the climate. “Sent to Vincennes for a shooting exercise, he noticed that his right eye could not see the target,” writes Paul Valéry in “Degas, danse, dessin” (1936). “My eyes have gone cold,” said the artist, who, since the 1880s, had seen a scotoma (from “skotos” – darkness, in ancient Greek) appear before his eyes, a black spot that affected his central vision but not his peripheral vision. Sensitive to daylight, Degas worked and received visitors in total darkness, as Julie Manet recounts in her diary. It is no surprise, under these circumstances, that the almost blind painter turned to charcoal, thicker and more legible than graphite. Never ceasing to create, he ended up devoting himself almost exclusively to sculpture from the late 1890s onwards.

Foto credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Camille Pissaro, „L’Avenue de l’Opéra, soleil, matinée d’hiver”, 1898