LH Franz On the way back home from my last trip to France, I sat next to a woman on the airplane who was an amateur artist, a painter. She was returning from a vacation to the town of Giverny in France. She and her fellow artists spent their days learning about Giverny’s most famous resident: The impressionist painter Claude Monet. They spent the week drinking in everything they could about Monet: Painted in his gardens, surrounded by sights and sounds and smells of Claude Monet’s home. It was a heavenly experience for them.
The painter Claude Monet is considered the founder of the Impressionist school of painting. No need to describe that here. Complete descriptions of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism are readily available.
Although Monet had struggles with money early on, he eventually became rather successful. He and his family moved to the house at Giverny in 1883, at first renting, and eventually purchasing the property and expanding the house to accommodate his family and artist studio. He lived there for the rest of his life and died in 1926.
But the impressionists made quite a stir when their movement started. Earlier schools of painting featured realistic pictures, often portraits of specific people, and extremely detailed landscapes. Impressionists stretched the rules. Unlike previous artwork, in impressionst paintings, the actual brush strokes are visible. The artists are more concerned with showing light and how it behaves. The subject matter isn’t always of real people or places. The label “Impressionist” was, the story goes, coined by a French art critic writing about the first exhibition in Paris of these artworks . He was taken by one of Monet’s paintings called “Impressionist, Sunrise” (“Impression, soleil levant”) and came up with the term “Impressionist” to describe this school of art. The term stuck.
Monet was incredibly prolific. His paintings included scenes from cities and countryside, but it was his garden that provided inspiration for a large body of his work. He painted it in different seasons of the year, in different kinds of weather, different times of day, different lighting during the day… The hundreds of paintings he created are in museums scattered all over the world.
During our visit, because of the crowds of people cramming into his house and art studio, we did not go inside. We spent our time walking around the gardens. Magnificent, magnificent gardens. We were overwhelmed by its colorful expanse. Birds sang and chittered in the background. I used the Merlin app on my phone, which identified the songs of fourteen different birds, including Eurasian Blackbirds, Eurasian Blue Tits, European Robins, Magpies, Wood-Pigeons. A real treat for the ears eyes and ears.
It’s impossible to describe the awesome feeling I had walking through the fields of flowers. Perhaps this video will give some small idea of the experience. (There are a couple of colorful chickens in there too. Apparently, Monet liked these chickens. I thought I heard the guide say these were descended from the ones he had. However they got there, they’re living the Life of Riley in their little pen, fed and cared for. As happy as chickens can be, I think.)