Monet's House and Gardens at Giverny

The place, briefly

Claude Monet moved to Giverny, a village on the Seine about seventy-five kilometers northwest of Paris, in 1883, renting a long pink-brick house with an orchard on the road through the village. He was forty-two, and he stayed for the rest of his life. In the autumn of 1890 he bought the property, replaced the orchard with the flower garden now called the Clos Normand, and planted it in massed color, bed by bed, planned by season.

In 1893 he bought the strip of land across the road and the railway, diverted an arm of the river Epte, and dug a pond. A local craftsman built the arched wooden footbridge he planted with wisteria — the Japanese bridge of the paintings. The water garden became his chief subject: the Water Lilies series occupied his last three decades, ending in the mural-scale panels he donated to France, installed to his own design at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Georges Clemenceau, who kept a house nearby, was the friend who pushed that gift to completion. Monet died in the house on 5 December 1926.

His son Michel Monet inherited the estate and in 1966 bequeathed it to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. By then the gardens were derelict; a restoration begun under curator Gérald van der Kemp in 1977 rebuilt them from photographs and letters, and the house and gardens opened to visitors in 1980. The Fondation Claude Monet runs the site today: the Clos Normand and the house with its yellow dining room and blue-tiled kitchen, then the underground passage to the water garden and the bridge. The season runs from the first of April to the first of November.