Monet's Giverny

We really had to get started early today so we set the alarm for 6am (hey--that's early for us!) to get ready for our train ride. We easily got to the train station and then began our search for buying a ticket (not the same train station as last week!) We found a very nice young man who immediately gave us a great big "HELLO" when we walked up, and then he said, "Let me guess--Giverny?" "How did you know?", we asked. He said that all foreigners who come to that train sation want to go to Giverny (and we thought it is was just a lucky guess!) OK, we've got our tickets, next problem--which track? Our schedule says track 18 and there's a train
there, but it says 8:07 instead of 8:16. After a few more questions, we find out our train is on Track 17. The train isn't very crowded and so we're off on a nice, 45 minute ride to Giverny.

On arrival, a bus picks you up at the train station and it's another 10 minute ride to Giverny. A short walk later and we're finally there. There are basically four things to see there: the studio, the house, the gardens, and the water-lily pond.

The gift shop was in the studio, but there were old photographs of Claude working in his studio and you could tell that was where he was. The house wasn't all that impressive either, except for one interesting thing. It had "copies" of all of his works (or at least the famous ones) and it told where the original was located. Of course we have seen most of them in the museums here, but there are still a few more to see. Some of them are in private collections, and we found one that was even in a museum in Baltimore.


Of course, the main attractions there are the gardens and the pond. The garden was just absolutely beautiful. Monet arranged with different palletes: a yellow area, a red area, a purple area and so on. Each area would have all kinds of different plants and flowers in that color spectrum. There were also big arbors that had climbing rose bushes all over them, which lead from area to area. You could "see" the paintings out there.


What Monet is most known for are his water lily paintings. He was an impressionist, right? That means he didn't try to paint things and make them look real, exactly how you see them. But rather he painted with as little effort as required to give you the "impression" of what he is looking at. Sometimes a lily pad is just one brush stroke, or a window pane is one brush stroke. When he paints a tree trunk, he is usually painting the bark. Again, rough brush strokes to give the impression of bark on the tree.


It's kind of interesting to look at his water lily paintings. He is always looking down at the water. The trees he paints are their reflections on the water. You can see his focus change over the years. At first he is painting the lily pads on the
water, then later he is painting the reflections on the water (kind of an upside-down world), and then later on he is actually focused on the water itself, showing all the ripples and waves and what they do to the reflections.

Even though it was a weekday, there were lots of people there, lots of tour buses, and so it made it difficult to take pictures without having a bunch of tourists in the picture. It kind of spoiled the fantasy! Anyway it was very nice. We had time before the bus picked us up so we hiked up the hill to the town church to see Monet's grave. His second wife and several of his children are buried there as well. Claude Monet died in 1926 and his son Michael died in 1966.


It was so nice to get out in the country, away from the hub-bub of the city. It made for a quiet, relaxing time. But an hour later, the train ride is over, and were back in the thick of it again.
And what we have are wonderful memories. Print this post