Monet collected Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and hung them on the walls of his yellow dining room. Utagawa Hiroshige, ‘Full Blossom at Arashiyama’, c.
Standing in a clos normand (traditional walled garden) and comprising flowerbeds, orchards and a vegetable plot, this house was home for Monet and his family for the rest of their lives. Monet rented Le Pressoir (wine press-house), a large pink rough-cast house with grey shutters that were soon to be painted bright green.
In April 1883, Monet’s family moved to the village of Giverny (approximately eighty kilometres north-west of Paris), which is situated on an ‘arm’ of the Seine river and surrounded by picturesque meadows, woods and low hills-an ideal environment for an Impressionist painter. Having stood on that rustic ‘Japanese’ bridge spanning the waterlily pond in his water garden, I can understand Monet’s extensive engagement with the mesmerising effect of peering into the depths of the water beyond the drifting waterlilies. In Monet’s painting, The bridge over the waterlily pond (1900), the water’s mirror-like surface reflects the bordering plants and weeping willows. Monet began his water garden at his home in Giverny in 1893, and over time the plants in and around the pond grew and merged, softened and framed. Claude Monet, ‘The bridge over the waterlily pond’, 1900, oil on canvas, 89.8 x 101.0 cm, Art Institute Chicago, Illinois.Ĭlaude Monet (1846-1926) painted water in its many forms and moods-a rough and animated sea, a misty and mysterious river, a still and reflective pond, and crisp, white snow.
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