01 May 2012

Claude Monet may have seen and painted UV light


From Galileo's Pendulum:
When he was 82 years old, Claude Monet suffered from such severe cataracts that he agreed to have the lens removed from his right eye. Cataracts that occur in elderly people turn the lens of the eye cloudy and yellowed, much like old glass can become discolored. The yellowing of the lens works as a filter, reducing the amount of blue light that reaches the retina. However, normal, healthy lenses filter out ultraviolet (UV) light, so when Monet’s lens was removed, he not only could see the blue hues again, he could also see a limited amount of UV—which he attempted to paint, as the images [above] demonstrate...

Monet’s ultraviolet vision highlights this inherent subjectivity: he painted what he saw (and the Impressionists argued that their art was the most “objective”, since they attempted to paint without details missed by the eye), but all art is translation. We do not see the UV light in Monet’s painting because our eyes cannot receive it … yet those pigments were obviously important to the painter himself...
The two images at top are crops from paintings by Monet of the same scene - "the house" as seen from "the rose garden."

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.

8 comments:

  1. I don't understand how the two pictures (or the link) allow to say anything about a UV vision.

    That what he saw would be blueish because of a change of filtering, more or less a tentative restauration to a normal state compaired to his still yellowish other eye, yes, I agree. Thus he would paint with more blueish colors.

    But to see quantitatively more UV ... even in a limited sense (i.e. just outside and close to the lower part of visible light), why? How?

    To see anything at all with a removed lense, he would have needed an apparatus fullfiling the missing lense function, a kind of optical system to focus, even crudely. The filtering properties of this replacement lense (glass? plastic?) should be taken into account before drawing any conclusion (and compaired to an healthy biological lense). Moreover the eye itself has other parts, also aging, where light is filtered/absorbed (cornea, vitrous humour,retina).
    To reproduce what he was seeing in UV he would have needed a retina UV-sensitive to see them firstly, and secondly corresponding UV pigments to paint.

    And we would need to check this late picture trough a device that would shifht the spectrum to something we could see to draw any comparison.

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  2. I had a cataract in my left eye and, after it was removed, found that I could see some of the longer waves (or lower frequencies) of ultraviolet light that other people can't. It's very hard to describe those shades and it's pretty amazing that the retina has receptors for frequencies of light it normally wouldn't "see."

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    1. I know exactly what you mean!

      I had a cataract (right eye) removed at 13 years old, and I've often tried to explain the extra colors that I can see, but it's so difficult. The weirdest effect for me is when I'm around black-lights... My lensless eye sees it as a kind of sky blue.

      Anyhow, nice to know that I'm not the only one and that we have some illustrious company.

      P.S. Love this blog; its the one I want updated the most.

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  3. utter B.S.

    Where, pray tell, did Money buy or create "ultraviolet pigments" with which he painted the scene with colors that my eyes can't perceive in the painting??

    and azawalli, UV is shorter wavelength (higher frequency).

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    1. I don't understand your hostility. If you read the excerpt it clearly says he was not actually painting in UV, but attempting to translate his experience with the additional perception for those without it while using standard paint. UV perception following lense removal is fairly well known.

      Also....if you're going to point out the errors of others...you might want to make sure it says "Monet" and not "Money."

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    2. My strong reaction is first and foremost to the statement, "We do not see the UV light in Monet’s painting because our eyes cannot receive it … yet those pigments were obviously important to the painter himself..."

      So the writer is telling us, "Here is a painting that demonstrates Monet's UV vision -- but you can't see what I'm talking about because your eyes are normal." Huh?!? Let alone the fact that my LCD monitor probably has pretty poor UV rendition!

      But I also dislike the intellectual dishonesty that we can learn anything about Monet's ability to see UV light by the two paintings shown. It is well known that Monet loved to paint the same scene at different times when the light is totally different. See his wonderful Rouen Cathedrals and the Haystacks series.

      If the writer had said that the cataract removal brought a more vibrant palette of colors to his work, that would certainly be plausible.

      Simply showing a purplish-bluish painting as evidence of UV vision is not logical. And look through his paintings: there are scores of paintings in his early years with intense purples and lavenders (long before the supposed UV ability).

      ..and sorry about the "Money"



      And I'm still trying to fathom what's meant by the sentence that Impressionists paint "objectively" since they eliminate details that the eye can't see??

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    3. @kgb: When I say I can see some of the lower frequencies (longer wavelengths) of ultraviolet light, I mean precisely that. UV is a range of frequencies (and wavelength, of course, is the inverse of frequency) and not all frequencies of UV are visible to me. Basically, I can see what's commonly referred to as "black lights."

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  4. @azawalli: OK, now I see what you mean. So tell, us: if you were to paint the near UV light, what color paint would you use?

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