Monet, Monet, Monet, Monet

When Karla asks me "what are you plans for the weekend?", getting up early on Sunday is never a first choice. In fact, in our eleven years together, it's never really been in the top three (or ten). But when you're on vacation, every day is kind of a Sunday, and July 5th, being the first Sunday of the month, and in the middle of a Parisian heat wave, meant that everyone would get free admission to every museum in Paris. Hence, our plans for Sunday was a trip to the northwest of Paris, requiring an early morning train from Paris to Vernon, capped with a short bus ride to Giverny.

Giverny is an exceedingly charming rural town (population 255) resting along the right bank of the Seine River. The architecture is simple and unassuming, but also beautifully photogenic as a result of the explosion of color contributed by the flowers that are seemingly everywhere. Also, every step in Giverny is accompanied by the songs of many, many different species of birds. I honestly cannot remember ever hearing so many different bird songs throughout the day, even as the heat of the sun began to settle over the town.

Of course, many of you will remember from your art history classes that Giverny is also a name that landed in the title of many of Claude Monet's paintings, owing to the fact that his home and gardens are situated there. Having seen Monet's works in books, I assumed he went out to some field, set up his easel, and started "impressioning" what he saw. And at the end of the day, he packed up everything and headed home. I was mistaken.

Monet took years to build his garden in Giverny. The oft painted pond adorned by water lilies that covered his canvasses was also a landscaping creation on his property. Much of the works that we all know (and that many of us bought as posters and then framed to be the art in our homes when we were twenty-somethings) were created at Monet's home "office."

One thing that Karla and I both noted in going through the museum was that Monet's signature and painting style changed dramatically in the early 1900s. Nothing unusual, artists often change the way they see or hear things. But nestled in a dark room in between many other photographs was a picture of Monet in 1922 or 1923, in a hospital bed, recovering from cataract surgery. He remained prolific, although somewhat fixated on his pond late in life, but we had to wonder if some of the change in his style didn't come about because he was truly seeing things differently.

Below is a link to some of our favorite pictures from our day in Giverny.

Giverny