Musée de l'Orangerie

This guide to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris opens on April 12, 1922, when an aging Claude Monet finally signed the paper his old friend Georges Clemenceau had been pressing on him for months, promising France nineteen panels for two oval rooms Monet designed himself. It follows the cataracts that were taking his sight even as he kept reworking the canvases from memory, and the operations he underwent in 1923 to try to see the light right one more time. Stand close to the surface nearest you and look at what he was painting toward the end.