Back Giverny

Claude Monet’s property in Giverny, left by his son Michel to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1966, became the Claude Monet Foundation in 1980 after considerable restoration work.

The coloured interior and age-old cosy charm of the legendary pink stucco house where the head of the Impressionist school lived from 1883 to 1926 have been restored.

In several of the rooms you can see his precious and magnificent collection of Japanese prints hung according to a plan drawn up by the Master of Giverny himself.

A short distance from the house, the vast Water Lilies workshop has also been meticulously restored.

 

The gardens, restored to their original state, offer for visitors’ admiration this “painting created from nature itself "that Claude Monet’s contemporaries considered one of his masterpieces.

In front of the house and the workshops, the "clos normand," or formal French garden, with its rectilinear design and arbours of climbing plants surrounding dazzling beds, offers from spring to fall the changing palette of a gardener-painter who was “crazy about flowers.”

Finally, further below, formed by a diversion of the Epte and shaded by weeping willows, the water garden with its famous Japanese bridge, wisteria, azaleas and pond has once again become the setting of sky and water that gave birth to the pictorial world of the water lilies.