Love in Later Life

After Alice's death in 1911, Monet faced his final years increasingly alone. Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, his daughter-in-law and stepdaughter, returned to care for him, but the relationship, while affectionate, could not replace the partnership he had shared with Alice. He threw himself into his work with renewed intensity, perhaps finding in the Water Lilies series a way to transcend personal loss through art.

There were rumors of romantic attachments in his widowerhood, particularly with his American friend Lilla Cabot Perry, but these seem to have been more the projections of others than reality. Monet's deepest relationship in his final years was with his art, and specifically with the garden at Giverny that had become both his subject and his consolation.