Reading up about this new symptom I found that I am in august company as none other then the great French landscape painter Claude Monet painted what are considered some of his greatest works while suffering from cataracts, however after receiving surgery Monet destroyed most of his canvases from his cataract period considering them too dull and dark, indeed during that period he frequently complained of the deterioration in his colour vision.
Although Monet was diagnosed with nuclear cataracts in both eyes by a Parisian ophthalmologist in 1912, at the age of 72, his visual problems began much earlier. Soon after 1905 (age 65) he began to experience changes in his perception of color. He no longer perceived colors with the same intensity. Indeed his paintings showed a change in the whites and greens and blues, with a shift towards "muddier" yellow and purple tones. After 1915, his paintings became much more abstract, with an even more pronounced color shift from blue-green to red-yellow. He complained of perceiving reds as muddy, dull pinks, and other objects as yellow. These changes are consistent with the visual effects of cataracts. Nuclear cataracts absorb light, desaturate colors, and make the world appear more yellow.
Monet was both troubled and intrigued by the effects of his declining vision, as he reacted to the the foggy, impressionistic personal world that he was famous for painting. In a letter to his friend G. or J. Bernheim-Jeune he wrote, “To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I’ve ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest; and on top of that, my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same and it’s this which I’d love to have been able to convey. All in all, I am very unhappy.” – August 11, 1922, Giverny.
http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/AVDE-Website/monet.html
Monet suffered from cataracts. His later paintings of the lily pond and the Japanese bridge at Giverny, when adjusted to reflect the typical symptoms of cataracts, appear dark and muddied. The artist's signature vibrant colors are muted, replaced by browns and yellows. Monet wrote of his growing frustration with his deteriorating vision, describing how he was forced to memorize where the colors were placed on his palette. In 1914 he wrote in his correspondence "colors no longer had the same intensity for me...reds had begun to look muddy...my painting was getting more and more darkened. on the one hand trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and, on the other, to force of habit".
As his vision continued to deteriorate, Monet's paintings became darker, less detailed and more abstract. The subject matter of the above painting from 1920 - the Japanese footbridge at Giverny, immortalized in his earlier water lily paintings - is barely recognizable.
Recent scientific studies no suggest that some of Monet's most famous paintings are not as abstract as was believed but in fact accurate depictions of how the world appears through cataracts.
