Giverny (Monet's House and Garden)

Claude Monet lived and gardened at Giverny, a village on the Seine river in Eure, eastern Normandy, France, from 1883 until his death in 1926. The property at 84 rue Claude Monet comprises two distinct gardens that Monet designed, planted, and cultivated obsessively, and which served as the primary source material for his celebrated late-period paintings. The Clos Normand is the formal flower garden in front of the pink-rendered house, structured by central allées overarched with climbing roses and filled with a dense mixture of annuals, perennials, and flowering shrubs arranged by colour and season. The house itself — pink with green shutters — contains reproductions of the Japanese woodblock prints that lined the walls during Monet's life; the famous yellow dining room and blue kitchen are preserved as they were in his lifetime. A tunnel beneath the road leads to the water garden, which Monet created on land purchased in 1893 and filled with water diverted from the Epte river. The Japanese-influenced water garden centres on a curved footbridge overarched with wisteria, with weeping willows, irises, water lilies, bamboo, and rhododendrons reflected in the green water below. The Water Lilies series (the Nymphéas), painted in the last twenty years of Monet's life as his eyesight deteriorated, grew directly from daily observation of this garden. The largest Nymphéas canvases are in Paris at the Orangerie; Giverny provides the landscape from which they came. The gardens are managed by the Fondation Claude Monet and are open from April through October only. Tickets sell out regularly in summer and must be booked well in advance.