“In Giverny he has a large orchard with, infront of the house, just a few flowerbeds, and two long beds on either side of the central path, with its entrance on the Chemin du Roy.” Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, 1960*

If the Normandy port city of Le Havre is the birthplace of Impressionism, then the Normandy village of Giverny is widely thought of now as the heart of impressionist art. But, by the time Claude Monet moved his family to Giverny in 1883 the heady days of the impressionist revolution in French art circles were in fact over. With his Giverny gardens and the lily ponds he created, Monet went on to place this small rural village at the centre of the impressionism. And today thousands of people visit Monet’s house and garden each year. [Read more →]

“These would-be artists call themselves revolutionaries, “Impressionists”. They take a piece of canvas, colour and brush, daub a few patches of paint on it at random, and sign the whole thing with their name. It is a delusion of the same kind as if the inmates of Bedlam picked up stones from the wayside and imagined they had found diamonds.” Anonymous 1876

Anyone with a passing interest in Western art and its history knows what ‘Impressionism’ is: it is a movement that originated in France in the 1860s where artists were no longer concerned with giving a factual image of a scene but rather they wished to capture the visual impression made by a scene. Artists like Edouard Manet and Claude Monet began by suggesting that painters should be painting their subjects as they see them, not in the confines of their studios with limited or monotonous sources of light. [Read more →]