Fri May 14th: Monet's Garden at Giverny

After seeing so many of Monet's paintings at Musee D'Orsay, I decided to do take a trip to Monet's house and garden in Giverny. I booked with a small group/ mini-van tour. Frank, our guide/ driver drove the seven of us to Giverny. Giverny is about an hour outside Paris, in the Normandy region. Normandy is France's Wisconsin - famous for cheeses and dairy products.

Since it's May, I wasn't sure if the garden would be in bloom. I was hoping that the trip was worth the time. Once we got beyond the Paris suburbs, the countryside was beautiful, green and lush. The hillsides were suddenly acres and acres of farms as well as lots of cows.

Monet's Estate at Giverny

Monet's estate and gardens are much bigger than I expected. You actually have to take an underground tunnel from the entrance / house area to the gardens. After you exit the tunnel and begin the walk of the gardens (traffic flos is one way), it's a feast for the senses. It literally felt like I had walked into one of Monet's paintings.

Monet designed the gardens and did the initial planting himself. As his wealth grew, th garden got more lavish. At one point, Monet had seven full-time gardeners. Although the garden looks lush and wild it was a great feat of landscape architecture and maintenance. Each day, Monet would prepare precise instructions for the gardening staff.

Lost in the Garden
I was taken with the beauty of Monet's garden and focused on getting some good photos. So focused, that I made the entire garden loop three times. There's not much signage and if you aren't watching closely, it's pretty easy to miss the exit. By the third time around (and no staff or English speaking people in sight) I was convinced that I would still be in the garden at closing and some staffer would find me.

Monet's House
Monet's house has none of his artwork. Here is the shocker - the house is full of Japanese woodblock prints, which Monet collected. Monet started collected Japanese prints in the 1860s. Continued collecting for thirty years. By the end of his life, Monet owned 231 Japanese engravings. The walls of Monet's home at Giverny are full of Japanese prints.

True confession: I skipped Monet's house. By the time I finally found my way out of the garden, I stopped by the house and saw the line of people waiting to get in. It was worse than Disneyland. Frank ensured that we bypassed the lines for the garden since we were able to use the group entrance and walk right in. After seeing the incredible gardens and ponds, I was just fine without waiting in that line to see the house. Instead, I decided to take a little walk toward the village of Giverny. Two of the ladies from our group provided the account of the house. According to them, the house was pretty ordinary (and a bit of a disappointment.

My husband, David, thinks I have an uncanny sense of what to skip. He calls it my "Nubian folklore dancer instinct," since that was when he first became aware of it. We were in Egypt on a Nile cruise in the mid 1990's. That night, the Nubian Folklore dancers were providing entertainment for the passengers. I was tired (and it didn't sound compelling). We skipped the performance and by all accounts it was a good call.

Monet Trivia

- Monet's parents wanted him to be a grocer.

- After the death of his first wife, Monet remarried. He and his second wife had a total of eight children (two from Monet's first marriage). The family lived at the Giverny estate.

- Monet's son Michel bequeathed the family estate (home, garden and waterlily pond) to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. Through the Fondation Claude Monet, the house and gardens were opened for visit in 1980, following a lengthy restoration effort.

- Why was Monet special? When Monet arrived in Paris and started painging, it was customary to paint a copy of a painting done by a master. Monet was a renegade. He looked out the window and painted what he saw.

- Monet painted a series of paintings with willow trees as a tribute to fallen French soldiers in WW1.

- Monet suffered from cataracts. The paintings he did in the time before his cataract surgery have a reddish hue.

- After his cataract surgery, Monet repainted some of his paintings.


- Monet's style of painting got more impressionistic and less focused as he got older, Why? Because he was losing his eyesight. That's the way everything started to look to Monet.

- Monet loved to paint the same scene over and over again during different times of day, with different light conditions and during different seasons.


Driving back to Paris, we stopped near the Seine where Monet regularly painted before he moved to Giverny. The area has amazing natural beauty.

If you're a fan of Monet's art, I encourage you to make the trek and see Giverny. I thought the lines were long for the garden and extraordinarily long for the house. This was a weekday visit and it wasn't the high-season for visitors.

Bonne Nuit