(Monet and his paintings, 1923, colorized, credit: openculture)
After awhile of living and painting many garden lily pond scenes outside his home in France, the artist Claude Monet became enthralled with the ocean. He wanted to paint it as he saw it and would get as close to it as possible with his paintbrush and palette, and he strained that he just couldn’t master the ocean with brush and canvas. And then one day, this eager, deeply serious man lost his balance, hat tipping to one side, he was pulled under a quick wave…He almost drowned, but he didn’t; he had gotten immediate help from two other men who pulled him right up and out of that wave, his pastel colored clothing soaked with seawater. Monet was seated safely on the sand, had some desired danger in his life then.
Blush of Dawn 