Cotton-Pickin’ Days

“Claude Monet painted the Japanese bridge in his Giverny garden near Paris in 1899 (left). The same scene, which he attempted to capture again between 1918 and 1924, shows that cataracts had blurred his vision and that the yellowing of his lenses had impaired his perception of blues and greens, leaving him in a world filled with murky reds and browns.”

From Scientific American, October 2004.