Essential Europe Travel

Giverny & American Museum

Entering Normandy, you will visit Claude Monet's home, the "Father of Impressionism". Discover the famous gardens created by the impressionist painter, and the well known Japanese bridge in the midst of its flowered paths and wather-lily ponds. This tour ends with the visit of the "Musée d'art Américain Giverny": Franco-American contributions to the history of art.

"Claude Monet's property at Giverny, left by his son to the Académie des Beaux-arts in 1966, has, after completion of large scale restoration work, become the Claude Monet Foundation, inaugurated in 1980. The house, with its pink crushed brick façade, where the leader of the Impressionist School lived from 1883 to 1926, once again has its colourful décor and intimate charin of former times. The precious collection of Japanese engravings is displayed in several rooms, hung in the marmer chosen by the master of Giverny himself.

The huge Nymphéas studio, a stone's throw from the house, has also been restored. It contains the Foundation's Shop. The gardens have been replanted as they once were and offer for the admiration of visitors the "painting from nature" which Claude Monet's contemporaries considered one of his masterpieces. The rectangular Clos Normand, with archways of climbing plants entwined around brilliantly coloured shrubs, lies before the house and studios, offering from Spring to Autumn the palette of varying colours to the painter-gardner who was "ecstatic about flowers". Lastly, the Water Garden, formed by a tributary of the Epte, lies further away, shaded by weeping willows. With its famous Japanese Bridge, its wistarias, azaleas and its pond, it has once more become that casket of sky and water which inspired the pictorial universe of the water lilies."