Color Is My Daylong Obsession Joy

Monet wrote this to a friend late in his career, when he had been systematically working through a series of canvases on the same subject — haystacks, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and finally his water lily pond at Giverny — returning day after day to capture shifts in light and atmosphere. The candor of the phrase captures what sustained his decades-long practice: color was not merely a technical problem but a source of almost physical pleasure and anguish simultaneously. His late work on the large Nymphéas panels, which he donated to the French state following the end of World War I, represents the most sustained expression of that obsession.