“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.

Giverny has archaeological evidence of occupation extending back to Stone Age times. A stone monument from this period is said to be Saint Radegonde’s grave. The Romanesque style church that dates to the 11th century is dedicated to Saint Radegonde: Queen of the Francs during the 6th century, and devoted to working for the sick and the poor, and was believed to cure scabies.

When Monet and his family moved to the village in 1883, it was largely an agricultural community of about 300 inhabitants: mostly farmers and a few middle class families. The village consists of two streets on the hillside lined with low houses with typical slate roofs, their walls covered with creepers. These streets are crossed by narrow lanes running down the hill. One of the streets, now Claude Monet Road, runs through the village. The ‘Chemin du Roy’ (now a busy departmental road that links Giverny to the nearby town of Vernon) follows the banks of the River Epte. Claude Monet’s house lies between the two streets.

Claude Monet first noticed the village while passing by on a train – this line has long since closed. In April of 1883 he and Alice Hoschedé, and their 8 children (two sons from Monet’s marriage with Camille – who died in 1879, and Alice’s four daughters and two sons from her marriage to Ernest Hoschedé) moved into Le Pressoir. At first he rented the property, and only became the own in 1890.

Now in his late forties, Monet went on to create some of the most iconic images of impressionist art – the paintings of water lilies in his ponds and the Japanese bridge.

Monet Lived in Giverny until his death in 1926; he and many of his family have been interred in the family vault which can still be visited in the village cemetry alongside the church.

It was not until 1980, nearly 100 years after the Monet family moved to Giverny, that their house and gardens were fully restored and opened to the public, thanks to the efforts of the Fondation Claude Monet. They have become an extremely popular tourist attraction. But despite the recent rise in visitor numbers to the village, it has managed to retain some of the charm so characteristic of Normandy villages.

*Quote from page 57, Jean-Pierre Hoschedé’s Claude Monet, ce mal connu. 1960. Cailler Publishers, Geneva.

“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.

These paintings caused a bit of a stir, as the quote above from an anonymous critic shows. In fact the establishment was outraged and prevented these new paintings being exhibited in the usual exhibitions. In 1874 Manet, Monet and others got together and organised their own exhibition in a sympathetic photographer’s studio.

The catalogue described one painting by Monet as “Impression, soleil levant” (Impression: sunrise). This is the painting, pictured above and now in the Musée Marmottan – Paris, of the port of Le Havre’s as seen by Monet through the early morning mists. One of the art critics of the time jumped on this title and labelled the group of artists ‘the impressionists’. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Le Havre is a wonderful place to visit, and the city has strong connections with the Impressionists. There are many events planned as part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 festival.