Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

As quoted in Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (1926) by Georges Clemenceau, Ch. 2. - 1920–1926