LEFT Claude Monet,
Water Lilies, 1916 -
’19, oil on canvas,
150x197cm
ABOVE Claude
Monet, Water
Lilies, 1 91 4 - ’17,
oil on canvas,
166.1x142.2cmC
laude Monet’s garden at Giverny is
one of the most popular once-private
gardens in the world. While more than
half a million people regularly descend upon this
otherwise quiet corner of Normandy, countless
more experience the lush natural beauty of his
estate from around the world via the hundreds
of paintings that he created of it during the last
43 years of his life.
A new exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in
the Netherlands is set to bring together many of
the artist’s greatest late canvases from Giverny.
Monet – The Garden Paintings will focus upon
works produced from 1900 onwards and chart
his search for abstraction in his own backyard.
Claude Monet first set eyes on what would be
his new home in Giverny in April 1883 while idly
looking out of a train window en route to Gasny.The following month, he rented the house –
known as Clos Normand – and two acres of land
that he would purchase outright seven years
later. Much like his paintings, Monet didn’t shy
away from colour when it came to decorating his
home, from the pink exterior to the Cerulean
Blue kitchen and bright yellow dining room.
The garden was as meticulously composed
as one of Monet’s canvases too. He gave daily
notes and precise planting diagrams to a
succession of gardeners who carried out the
work. As Giverny resident Claire Joyes noted in
her book, Claude Monet at Giverny, the French
artist “established a number of basic principles
to which he always adhered: bare earth was
anathema to him; he avoided dark flowers;
conversely, he could never get enough of blue...
he abhored single flowers, permitting doubleMUSEE MARMOTTAN/FINE ARTS MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO