4.9/5
Yes. Did Monet paint his own garden? He painted almost nothing else for the last quarter century of his life. Monet rented a house in Giverny, about 50 miles west of Paris, in 1883 and died there in 1926. In those 43 years he turned an orchard and a marshy plot across the railway line into one of the most painted gardens in art: about 250 canvases of the water garden alone.
The odd part is the order of events. Most painters go looking for a motif. Monet grew his. When he bought extra land in 1893 he wanted a water garden “both for the pleasure of the eye and for the purpose of having subjects to paint,” in his own words. So the pond was a studio before it was a view, and that is why so many of the Monet paintings people hang at home turn out to be pictures of one small patch of Normandy.
Gardens came first, long before Giverny
Giverny was his biggest garden, not his first. In 1867, on the Normandy coast, he painted a terrace garden at Sainte-Adresse: flags snapping in the wind, beds of red flowers, boats on the Channel behind. A few years earlier he had set women in pale summer dresses among the flower beds, sunlight falling on their skirts and on the path.
In the 1870s he rented houses at Argenteuil and Vétheuil and made modest gardens at both. Then he painted them. The garden at Vétheuil, with its path climbing to the house between tall flowers, is a rented plot he planted himself. Nobody paid him to do this. He just wanted flowers outside the door and something to paint in the morning.
Building a garden that could be painted
Money changed the scale. He bought the Giverny house in 1890 and tore out the kitchen garden and orchard in front of it, the Clos Normand, replacing them with flower beds packed so tight they bloomed through every season. By the 1890s he employed as many as eight gardeners. He asked leading horticulturists for advice and he bought the new hybrid flowers that nurseries were suddenly producing in huge quantities.
The water garden came next, and it started with a fight. In 1893 he bought the plot beyond the railway line at the edge of his property, land beside the river Epte with a small pond of arrowhead and wild water lilies. To feed a bigger pond he asked the prefect of the Eure for permission to dig channels from the Ru, a branch of the Epte. The villagers objected. They were sure his foreign plants would poison their cattle and foul the water.
Monet was furious. Three months later the permit came through.
He enlarged the pond and swapped the wild lilies for hybrids bred by Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, the grower who produced the first colored hardy water lilies, in yellows, pinks, whites and violets. In 1895 he put a humpback wooden bridge across the narrow end, modeled on the bridges in Japanese prints. Two more digs, in 1901 and 1904, tripled the size of the water garden.
Did Monet paint his own garden right away? Not quite
He waited. Monet painted three views of the new bridge in 1895, then dropped the subject until 1899. The plants needed years to grow in, and so, it seems, did he. Much later he put it like this: “It took me some time to understand my water-lilies. It takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation – how wonderful my pond was – and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment.”
When he came back, he came back in series. He made 18 versions of the lily pond in 1899–1900, each one mixing the floating lilies with reflections of the plants around the pool. Put the 1899 version in New York next to the London canvas from the same year and you can watch him change the light while keeping the bridge in exactly the same place.
Compare them with photographs of the real pond and something looks off. The pool was never as closed in as he painted it. He cropped away the sky, let the willows crowd the top of the frame and cut the bridge off at both edges, so it hangs over the water with nothing holding it up. The garden he painted was a garden he had already composed once with a spade. On canvas he composed it a second time.
Then the bridge disappeared
Between 1903 and 1908 he painted a group of pictures with no bridge, no bank and no horizon. A nearly square canvas from 1906 is typical: clusters of lily pads at two corners, a path of open water between them, trees and clouds showing only as reflections. Technical study of that picture shows him changing it again and again while he worked.
This is the part of the garden people picture first. Around 200 of the 250 garden canvases show lilies floating on the surface, and the rest take in the bridge, the weeping willows, wisteria, and the irises, agapanthus and day lilies on the banks. A gardener would recognize every plant. A painter would notice he’d stopped caring where the water ended.
The last and largest pictures
His health failed and his second wife died, and for several years he barely worked. During the First World War he started again. In 1916 he built a new studio at Giverny big enough for canvases more than two meters high, and alongside them he painted a suite of 19 smaller pictures, among them a wide pond view of 1917–19. Photographs show him working outdoors in the garden; he began pictures by the water and finished them in the studio. By then, memory and observation had run together.
On November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice, he offered two large panels to the French state as a symbol of peace. He finished the full set of 22 canvases, more than 90 meters of painted water, months before his death. They went up in 1927 in the two oval rooms he designed for them, meant to give what he called the “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.”
Which garden picture is the famous one?
There isn’t a single one. “Water Lilies” (Nymphéas in French) is the title on hundreds of canvases and on the whole Orangerie cycle, which is why the name gets used as if it meant one painting. The bridge pictures go by titles like Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies and The Water-Lily Pond. If one work has to stand for the garden, it’s the Orangerie ensemble, eight compositions wrapped around two rooms.
Is the garden still there?
Yes. In 1966 Monet’s son Michel left everything to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which inherited the Giverny house along with the works still in the family, more than a hundred canvases. Many of the late water lilies, and the last Japanese Bridge pictures, had never been shown while he was alive; they went on view only when they reached the Paris museum that inherited Giverny. That same museum has held the 1872 harbor sunrise since 1940, the canvas that gave a whole movement its name.
The flower beds and the pond are still at Giverny. If you want to go, we walk through the garden one painting at a time in a separate guide, with the practical side of the trip.
A pond for your own wall
A lily-pond picture is hard to copy well. Thin veils of color sit over thick strokes, and the reflections have to read as water, not as paint. Art & See reproduces these by hand in oil on canvas. The garden pictures hang with the rest of Monet’s work in our catalog, and if you’d like to look beyond him, start with the paintings people ask us for most.
