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"Aside from painting and gardening," Monet once modestly declared, "I'm not much good at anything." Today, this pioneer of Impressionism would undoubtedly be pleased that his garden at Giverny ranks among the masterpieces it inspired.
In April 1883, Claude Monet rented a large pink house in Giverny, a small village roughly forty miles northwest of Paris. There he built a studio in a barn, where he painted the surrounding fields, trees, and countryside, as well as the banks of the nearby Seine. At that time, the garden consisted of a vegetable plot, a large orchard, and a small pond. When his canvases began to sell, in large part due to the efforts of London-based art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, he was eventually able to buy the house and land for his family and modify the orchard and vegetable plot. He transformed the land into a vast French-style garden that was bisected by a path shaded by trellises. On the west side, between cherry trees and Japanese apple trees, the lawns were dotted with irises and poppies in spring. On the east side, rock-garden plants and perennials bloomed in continuous succession from spring to fall.
In 1893, ten years after arriving at Giverny, Monet bought a piece of land separated from the adjacent formal walled garden, called the Clos Normand. It was there that Monet hoped to create his water garden. He requested permission to re-channel a tiny creek, the Epte, which was to be used to supply a pond for growing aquatic plants. He also asked for authorization to erect a small bridge across the pond.
After numerous bureaucratic entanglements, Monet was finally able to excavate the pond. In 1895, he built a Japanese footbridge modeled after a Japanese print and covered it with blue and white wisteria. The water garden was mysterious, meditative, and exotic, while the Clos Normand garden was more geometric, its lines softened by wild geraniums overflowing into the pathways. Although the water garden landscapes are more famous, the lush, multicolored Clos Normand garden, located nearer to his house and studio, was the subject of numerous paintings. Monet's interest in water lilies manifested itself in a series of studies exhibited in 1897, and the Japanese bridge appeared in a series of eighteen works created in 1899. This was the subject that would make him famous in France, England, and the United States.
No longer content to look for his subjects in nature, Monet began to arrange and orchestrate the natural beauty that inspired his creations. He placed each plant and flower in such a way that it could eventually be used in his work. The same principles governing the rhythms of color and light in the gardens their harmonies and chromatic relations, their textures and compositions were also used in painting his canvases.
For Monet, the floating water lilies expressed the voluptuous calm and the incessant changes of nature. Breaking from classical tradition, Monet painted the same subject again and again, closely observing it in daily changes of light and atmosphere. Transcribed to canvas, the water-lily pond became a mirror reflecting the subtle transformations of light.
After the death of his second wife Alice in 1911, Monet dreamed of offering France a vast series of murals. During 1914-15, he built an immense studio where in 1916 he began the magnificent series Water Lilies, which now hangs in the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. In the artist's final years, only his garden occupied his thoughts, and upon his death in 1926, the garden and the house came into the possession of his son Michel. When Michel died, the garden was in a state of decline and was ultimately bequeathed to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
It was not until 1977 that the painstaking and meticulous task of restoring Monet's domain was undertaken. Monet's garden is once again resplendent and faithful to his vision. Open to the public from April to October, it is now one of the most popular landscape gardens in the world.
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