Flânerie in Claude Monet’s Giverny Gardens

This is the 31st in a series of walking tours highlighting the sites and stories of diverse districts of Paris.

I entered the garden by the back gate, along a damp path where bamboo grew tall. Through the canes came glimpses of a little river tributary, re-routed long ago by a man who wanted to create a pond in his garden. Overhanging foliage made some parts dark, but here and there a gap opened up and sparkles of sunlight bounced off the water and the patches of bright green foliage. And then, around a corner, there it was: Monet’s lily pond.     

Sometimes, a view I’ve been longing to see can disappoint. But not here. The water was an oasis of calm, dotted with clusters of lily pads and their bright flowers, wisps of cloud reflected here and there across the surface. It was framed all around the edge by a profusion of bushes and trees, each with their own shape and shade of green, some still flowering in the early autumn sunshine. The path snaked unevenly around the pond, taking every visitor over the Japanese Bridge and around to the far side. Part of the attraction, I think, is that the water stays clear of people and so everyone gets a good grasp of the view which Monet had designed. 

It seemed that every few yards brought a new vista, each reminiscent of a Monet canvas. I knew he’d created this garden from scratch, on land which was originally  across a main road from his property. Had he dug the pond and planted the lilies to create something beautiful to paint? Quite the reverse. He’d fallen in love with water lilies elsewhere and created this garden to have some of his own. It was only later, he said, that he “had a revelation” and really appreciated their beauty. It was at that moment in the 1890s, when he was nearly 60, that he found the subject which would enchant him for the rest of his life: “I took up my palette,” he wrote “and since then, I’ve hardly painted anything else.”      

These days, an underpass connects the pond garden to the rest of Monet’s property. Here too, his twin passions of art and gardening are inextricably linked in a colorful montage. The dusky pink house, with its dark green shutters, sits behind an exuberance of flowers. The plants are divided by color, like an artist’s palette, the hot reds and oranges on my left giving way to mauves and blues, reminding me that Marcel Proust had said this was “not so much a flower garden as a color garden.” The order imposed by the rows of planting and by the central trellises, where the summer roses were just fading, was delightfully diluted by the little pathways, heading here and there, inviting exploration of the garden which Monet himself said was “my most beautiful masterpiece.”

When Monet bought this house in 1883, it was a long, low farmhouse with a barn attached. He gradually extended it, converting one room into his studio at first, but eventually adding another in the grounds. He began altering the inside décor, adding bright colors to many of the rooms and opening up the house to the garden with French windows, gradually turning the dark interiors typical of a 19th century farmhouse into the cheerful family home which suited the artist who was so in love with color. 

I went first into the drawing room, which Monet had used as his studio. It had a half-and-half atmosphere, with sofas, cane chairs and family photos amid copies of the paintings he had chosen to have around him as he worked. He had tried, he said, to keep something from every stage of his career. Amid the jumble of paintings jammed onto the walls, many of them unframed, I spotted scenes from London and the Normandy coast, one of his haystack paintings and another from the series on Rouen Cathedral. It did really feel like a living room where he worked, or maybe a studio where the family came to watch him as he painted.   

The browns and creams of the drawing room did not prepare me for the riot of color which was to follow. In the Blue Salon, every wall panel and every piece of wooden furniture, from the cupboards and bookcase to the grandfather clock, was painted in an icy blue, all the style details picked out turquoise. All around the room, framed copies of Japanese prints lined the walls. The chilly colors of Snow on the Sumida River and Sudden Shower over Shin-ahashi Bridge worked perfectly with the surrounding hues chosen by Monet. 

The dining room was a big surprise. The walls, the fireplace surround, the glass-fronted cabinets, the slatted wooden chairs with their curved tops were all painted in sunshine yellow. Through the French windows a wooden green veranda overlooked  the garden, giving an airy, country feel to the room where the artist liked to dine en famille at 12:30 punctually every day. A second color, blue, was dotted through the room, on the fireplace tiles, the Dutch-style blue and white crockery and the jumble of plates mounted here and there on the walls. It felt both easy-going and carefully planned.   

Even the kitchen had an artist’s stamp about it. Blue and white ceramic tiles in various designs covered the walls behind the fireplace and above the enormous range. A tiled shelf displayed the copper jugs and cooking pots which must have been functional, but which here formed a display both artful and random, creating a homely feel, but with a hint of the designer eye behind it. The door and window frames, I noticed, were all painted blue. I remembered reading that it was in this room that Monet’s body was laid out after his death, when his friend Georges Clémenceau had vetoed the black sheet proposed for covering the coffin, crying “No!  No black for Monet” and replacing it with a colorful, flower-patterned cloth. 

Upstairs, the artist’s influence was everywhere. A sea of green and turquoise for his wife Alice’s bedroom, pretty creams and lilacs in daughter Blanche’s room, copies of the Cézanne paintings exactly where he chose to hang them in his bathroom and, in his own bedroom, a selection of paintings through which, as the guidebook says, “the whole story of impressionism is told.” For here, Monet surrounded himself with  paintings by others, a selection of pieces he particularly admired, and the copies there today are hung exactly as he stipulated.  Centrally, above the plain cream-colored bed, hangs Gustave Caillebotte’s well-known Paris Street, Rainy Day, surrounded by a little selection of other works including Renoir’s Bather Seated on a Rock and Cézanne’s Picnic on a Riverbank. Around the room, are over 30 more paintings, outdoor scenes, portraits and still lifes, by artists as varied as Delacroix, Berthe Morisot, Degas and Pissarro. 

I knew that the shop I passed through before leaving was in a large room that had been special to Monet. He’d commissioned it as a new studio, just as World War One was starting, saying he wanted somewhere to shut himself away alone, to lose himself in work, so as “not to think any more about all the horrors being committed so relentlessly.” His eyesight was fading because of cataracts and his mind was surely taken up with recent sadnesses, the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and of his son Michel, fighting for France in 1914. His solace was the production of eight giant canvases, the water lily paintings which now hang in the Orangerie in central Paris.  

There, in the huge, airy room where ceiling panels of glass let in as much light as possible, just as Monet had wanted, I could sense his presence. For, on the back wall, behind tables piled with guidebooks and Monet-themed scarves and jewellery, were hung prints from the Nymphéas. Their muted blues, greens and mauves portray a scene of melancholic beauty and were, I knew, his gift to the nation to mark the armistice in 1918. The copies can’t match the originals, but to see them here, where he spent long days painting them, “hardly putting my brush down,” as he put it, was very special. 

I wandered from the house along the lane to the country church where he is buried. I passed a Norman farmhouse, little cafes where the tables clustered outside looked like scenes from a painting and fields where haystacks stood, just as they had when Monet set up his easel there to paint them. Then came the village church, Sainte Radegonde, where a stone cross marks the family grave and a plaque recalls the artist who made his home in this village for over 40 years: “Here lies our beloved Claude Monet, born on the 14th November 1840, died on the 5th December, 1926, missed by all.” I looked at the bright flowers, pushing up from the soil all around the grave, as pretty as, yes, a picture and remembered that he once said “I must have flowers, always, and always.”