Monet's Garden at Giverny
I spent some time this weekend working in my rose garden. As I picked off the newly withered blooms and watered the thirsty plants, I felt a sense of connection growing between my garden and me. The drooping blooms looked like sleeping heads lolling forward on a warm autumn afternoon until the water I brought woke them from their slumber. They seemed to spring to life once again, renewed with energy. I felt a responsibility for my garden; to nurture it and to help it thrive. There’s a special relationship between a gardener and his garden, and one of the most famous relationships like this I know was between the Impressionist painter Claude Monet and his garden in the town of Giverny, France.
Monet’s relationship with his gardens thrived for the forty-three years he lived and painted at Giverny. He had two gardens that he spent his time tending - the Clos Normand and his famous Water Garden with the Japanese Bridge. He meticulously designed Le Clos Normand, the garden in front of his house, so that the colors, heights of the flowers, and growing seasons created a living canvas for him to enjoy. Ten years after he moved to Giverny, Monet bought the land next to his property on the other side of the railroad tracks. He dug a pond for his second garden and populated it with beautiful water lilies. Monet was so particular about how pristine the lilies needed to be kept that his gardener would take a boat out early in the morning to clean the soot off of the water lily’s petals that the trains had left behind the day before. Monet loved his water garden and focused on painting it for the last thirty years of his life, creating 250 paintings that have delighted the world ever since.
Monet’s love for Japanese block prints, which was a popular and exotic interest to the artists of the time, influenced his desire to install a Japanese Bridge over his lily pond. With this addition, he created a Japanese-style garden filled with wisteria, weeping willows, and bamboo. Monet created his masterpieces twice; once in the planning and planting of the gardens, and then again when he painted them. Monet’s interest in painting the effects of light and color that reflected in the water, rather than focusing on painting the flowers themselves, made his water lilies one of the most recognizable works of art in the world. After World War I, the day after the armistice, Monet gifted eight large panels of his water lilies, or Nymphéas, to the French people. These paintings are a permanent fixture at the Orangerie in Paris. You can view the fabulous Nymphéas at the Orangerie here.
In The Suitcase Adventures: Paris - Behind the Peacock Gate, the main character, eleven-year-old Brianna Dubois, has a poster of Monet’s Nymphéas in her room. Brianna’s love for art comes from the time she spent drawing with her dad, a French artist in his own right, who taught her all about his favorite French painters. When Brianna goes to Paris to meet her French grandmother, Mamie, she tucks a sketchpad into her backpack so she can sketch the sights she sees as she discovers more about her French family history.
I look forward to telling you more about Brianna’s adventure in Paris in future blog posts.
À bientôt!