Monet's Ultraviolet "Beew" Vision

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The House Seen from the Rose Garden 1922-24 Claude Monet

Bees and butterflies are the Olympic champions of color vision. Bees and butterflies have five or more color receptor cones allowing their range of vision to extend into the ultraviolet. We humans and especially artists are continually inspired, even awed by, the beauty and grace of flowers. However, we don’t really see them fully, because we can’t. Many of the flowers bees and butterflies pollinate have ultraviolet patterns on their petals, like lights on a runway, to guide their insect friends deep into the flower. There was one well-known human artist who attained a little bit of bee-vision capability. Claude Monet. Here’s how it came about.

Monet’s old-age struggles with cataracts and loss of vision are well documented in the letters he wrote to his eye doctor, Dr. Charles Coutela. As the cataracts worsened, he could not perceive colors or values well. His increasingly yellow-brown lenses led him to try to co…