“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” Claude Monet.

For almost 43 years, from 1883 to 1926, Claude Monet lived in Giverny, Normandy. There he combined his passion for colour, flowers and gardening and created one of the now most famous and well known historical gardens in World. A garden that most people know having seen reproductions of his wonderful paintings. [Read more →]

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” Claude Monet.

Tucked away in a small little square, Place St Amande, is the city of Rouen’s homage to Claude Monet. Admittedly, it is not an unattractive little square, with some very typical medieval timber framed town houses. But not only is the square a bit out of the way, it really does not have anything that one would associate with Claude Monet. It is not as if the timber framed houses were subjects he ever painted, and the Cathedral he has made World-famous can only just be seen on the skyline.

Monet painted the Cathedral over 30 times in the winter of 1892/3. While in Rouen he set up a temporary studio across from the Cathedral where he would work. And even while working in this wonderful medieval city, he was thinking of his garden. From his letters to Alice, we know he met a few gardeners in Rouen from whom he obtained flowers which he then posted back to his house in Giverny.

During his time in Rouen Monet also met Émile Varenne, director of the Botanical Garden. Varenne not only introduced Monet to the gardeners who gave Monet various plants, but he also gave Monet a great deal of advice and friendship. Monet would work on his Cathedral series in the morning and then go to the Botanical Gardens in the afternoon, where he would spend hours in the greenhouses. In a letter to Alice, dated 16 February 1893, he records his amazement for their orchid collection.

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People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.” Claude Monet, 1902.

As Claude Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral 30 times at different times of the day and in different weather conditions over a period of a few months, it is not that surprising then that the Cathedral will play an important part in this year’s summer festival to celebrate the impressionists in Normandy. [Read more →]

‘Things don’t advance very steadily, primarily because each day I discover something I hadn’t seen the day before … In the end, I am trying to do the impossible.’ Claude Monet, 1892

The Impressionists by Night in Rouen, as part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 summer festival, will take place each night, 1 June – 30 September, in front of the Musée des Beaux Arts and the Cathedral, the same Cathedral Claude Monet painted some 30 times in changing lighting conditions. [Read more →]

“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 →]

“Clemenceau came to pay us a visit after lunch and stayed until 5 o’clock. … He was so amazed by the garden, and the water lilies, that he said to his daughter as he left: ‘You know, on the way home we are going to sell Bernouville, there is nothing more to be done after seeing Monet’s garden!’” Alice Monet, June 1909*

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, has in its collection a number of Claude Monet’s paintings of the pond he created, the water lilies and the Japanese bridge. These include the large triptych, Water Lilies (1914–26), a painting of the water lilies in the pond, Water Lilies (1914–26), The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26). [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 →]

“I count on doing a large canvas of the cliffs of Etretat, although it is certianly bold of me to do that after after Courbet who did it admirably, but I will try to do it differently …” Claude Monet, January 1883

Claude Monet spent a great deal of time at the coastal fishing town of Étretat, painting the white cliffs, the fishing boats and some inland scenes in all light and weather. His first series of paintings of this area were made during an extended visit to Etretat in 1883-1884. Then again in September 1885 he returned to Etretat with his family, and stayed on in the town once they had returned to Giverny in October until early January, with some brief sojourns to Paris and Giverny. [Read more →]

President Sarkozy of France is said to be considering whether Claude Monet’s remains should be removed from the church cemetery in Giverny to the Panthéon in Paris.

The Panthéon (the name derives from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘every god’), located in the Latin Quarter of Paris, is the chosen burial place for France’s national heroes, and currently includes the likes of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, Pierre and Marie Curie, to name but a few. An act of Parliament is required for a person’s remains to be interred therein, the last person person being Alexandre Dumas whose remains were reburied in 2002. [Read more →]