Claude Monet - Life at Giverny

For forty-three years Monet lived and painted at Giverny, where he created a spectacular and beautiful garden. He spent large sums of money to preserve the landscape around this Normandy village while he designed his own, now famous, gardens with their flower beds, ponds and bridges. Monet’s great sequence of paintings, the Water Lilies, together with those showing the vine-covered green bridge or the flower beds at Giverny, are among the pillars of modern art. Now these entrancing gardens, which were the source of his inspiration and which take us to the heart of the Impressionist world, have been restored to their earlier splendour by Gérald Van der Kemp, formerly Director of the National Museum at Versailles. In the only book produced since the restoration, we see Giverny as it was in Monet’s time - his wonderful collection of Japanese prints hung throughout the house and studio, and the gardens as he would have seen them, photographed by Jean Batho, one of Fi ance’s best-known photographers. Claire Joyes, an art historian who lives at Giverny and is married to Claude Monet’s grandnephew, describes daily life at the house and the working habits of Monet, whose delight in flowers was possibly surpassed by his love of good food, wine and friends. The Monet family has contributed family photographs of the irascible old master working, chatting or guiding dignitaries through his paths and by his ponds, and more than thirty-five of the Giverny paintings are reproduced too. This thoroughly enchanting book is as close as we can now come to witnessing Monet at work and his infectious enjoyment of nature, life and paint.