Dali House

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time.

“I am in raptures,” Monet said, having creating a real-life canvas that he could now re-create in oil and watercolour.

When he died his son Michel inherited the house and garden but let Monet’s step-daughter Blanche stay there instead. She did a good job on the upkeep until World War II, when everything went to pot. When Michel gave the whole spread to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1966 they had a hell of a job on their hands, and it took almost 10 years and a whole lot of reminiscing by the village’s old codgers for them to get it back to the way it was when Monet was in charge.

American fans played a big role in restoring the house, which is fitting because Americans had basically taken over Giverny.

Neither William Singer Sargent nor any of the other half-dozen artists who rented houses in the village in the late 1880s and dined at the Cafe Baudy knew that Monet had preceded them. Many more came later and shared the master’s joy in the village, but he studiously avoided their distraction.

To this day Giverney has only two streets bisected by narrow lanes tumbling down a hill. Monet’s Eden is between what’s now called the Claude Monet Road and the Chemin du Roy, which hugs the River Epte, the little Ru’s mama.

In front of Monet’s house is the massively flowered Clos Normand, and across the road the waterlily pond. When the shiny hues of impressionism faded to autumn, he sank happily into thought among the freshly buffed lily pads.

Monet was a Parisian, born there in 1840, though he grew up in Le Havre, a spoiled brat. “No one was ever able to make me stick to the rules, not even in my youngest days,” he told Le Temps in 1900, saying he’d regarded college as prison, but at least he found his textbooks useful for caricaturing. Only at the laisser-faire Academie Suisse (10 francs for a studio with models!) could he get away with stuff.

Cheeky caricatures soon turned into money-earning portraiture and Monet headed back to Paris to be a painter. “I met Pissarro, who had not yet thought of being a rebel and was simply working in Corot’s style. I felt this to be a good model to emulate and I followed suit.”

At 20 the army reeled him in and spun him off to Algeria for two years. Unlike the usual war stories full of bullets and bodies, his tour was about sunshine and shade. “You cannot imagine the extent of what I learned and how much my ability to see improved. I was not immediately aware of this. The impressions of light and colour that I gained there were, to some extent, put aside later, but the kernel of my future research came from them.”

Typhoid sprung Monet from the ranks early, and back home and demobbed, he found in Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille the kind of artistic companions with whom he could march forward, brush raised. “I immediately preached revolt to them,” he told the newspaper, and off they went to the woods of Fontainbleau, southeast of Paris. In a change from previous visitors with an artistic bent, they poked holes in the gloom and let the sunbeams in.

After initially bouncing off the walls of the formal Salon a few times, Monet found some traction with a painting of his mistress (and later wife) Camille Doncieux, “The Woman in the Green Dress”, but still not enough. By the time Camille got pregnant a few months later, they were living off the kindness of strange artists. Monet’s aunt was willing to put him up, but not her. It kept him on the move.

By the mid-1860s, though, Monet had definitely found his stride and was earning acclaim. “I was swimming in opulence … I was ready to recklessly hurl myself into the open. It was a rather dangerous novelty. No one had attempted it, not even Manet, who innovated only later, after me. His painting was still very conventional and I still remember the contemptuous way in which he spoke of my beginnings.

“It was in 1867, my style had began to stand out, but for all that, it was far from revolutionary. I was still a long way off from my adoption of the principle of the division of colours — which turned so many people against me, but I was partially trying it out and would practise different effects of light and colour which contravened received ideas. The selection committee, which was all in my favour in the beginning, turned against me and when I presented my new painting to the Salon, I was shamefully rejected.”

The relationship between Manet and Monet had got off on a bad foot at the ‘66 Salon when the former arrived at the exhibition to a swell of compliments, only to discover that everyone was talking about “Woman in Green” and thought it was his. Manet was furious.

Three years later they decided they could be sociable. “From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening at the Cafe Batignolles, where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there, Fantin-Latour and Cezanne, Degas — who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola, who was just starting off in the literary world and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir.

“There was nothing more interesting than these discussions, with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our mind and souls were stimulated. We would encourage each other to make unbiased and sincere observations. We would nourish each other with enthusiasm which had the power to sustain us for weeks on end, until we were able to give definite form to the idea.”

When the Franco-Prussian War made life difficult in Paris, Monet scudded off to London and found Charles-Francois Daubigny, who was doing views of the Thames. Monet gained not just that inspiration from him but an introduction to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.

“Durand-Ruel, became for us, our saviour. For more than 15 years, my painting as well as that of Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro, had no other market than through him.” Other dealers took over after that, and “our works … were judged not to be quite as bad as previously thought. At Durand-Ruel, they were not wanted, but once placed with others, confidence increased and people bought. The pendulum was in motion. Today, everyone wants to know us.”

Monet went back to Le Havre with “Impression: Sunrise” and an idea for an artistic movement in his pocket. He rented a house at Argenteuil where he and Camille lived for six years while impressionism hit full flower, even if the 1874 exhibition that he put together with Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley was a costly botch.

Monet was busted down again, hanging on to his place in Argenteuil only through Manet’s chequebook and not even able to turn a sou selling his wares at the Hotel Drouot. And yet his paintings were still as sunny and spontaneous as a baby.

In later years Monet trundled around France chasing the sunlight. Camille died in 1882, and the following year Monet came to rest in Giverny. In 1892 he married Alice Hoschede, who’d been his lover behind Camille’s back, and whipped up his array on Rouen Cathedral. Financial security came and found him at last. He blew most of it on his garden, and blew most of his eyesight squinting through cataracts at shadows, but he kept painting almost all the way up to December 5, 1926.

They put him in the family vault near the village church, out of the way of the half-million people who come every year to see where he lived.

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Go have a poke around the garden
Lots of paintings