I realized I needed a break from the city, so the other weekend I took the train and then, the bus to Giverny in Upper Normandy, to see Claude Monet's house and garden. This is the place where Monet lived for the last decades of his life, creating and reshaping two lovely gardens, the Clos Normand (roughly, the Norman Yard) and the Water Garden, that he painted in several series.
The Clos Normand is a very charming large flower garden filled with many varieties of flowers and, just as important to the effect, birdsong. Even though laid out by a great artist, it doesn't feel perfectly designed, and that looseness makes it all the more relaxing and agreeable.
The house is a long, simple old building whose back presses right up against the main village road, opening on the other side to the Clos Normand. The outside is painted in white and pink, and the rooms inside are also painted in happy pastel shades of blue, green, and most wonderfully, yellow in the large dining room. It is apparently now furnished as it was in Monet's time (his painting studio is especially evocative), and the house displays Monet's excellent collection of Japanese prints throughout. (I couldn't take many photos inside because they weren't allowed, but you can see a bit more of the interior here.)
When I was younger, my mom purchased, mounted and displayed in our house a large poster of one of Monet's "Water Lilies" paintings of the Water Garden, along with getting a monograph of those paintings. Now I can say I've been to the garden itself, but I haven't yet seen the "Water Lilies" paintings installed at the Orangerie in Paris; does that mean I have or haven't seen the "real thing" yet?
Well, did I feel like I was inside an Impressionist painting? To be honest, no. That's not a complaint about the beautiful gardens, of course, any more than it is a criticism of Monet. I can certainly see the inspiration for his paintings in the gardens, but it also reminded me of how much of the artist is in a work, regardless of the "faithfulness" of that work. A work of art is most faithful when it is closest to the what the artist experienced, rather than what was "there."
The village of Giverny is in a valley along the River Seine. Here's the view of the valley from the spot I found up a hill to eat lunch.
... And of course, what touristy village is complete without a sand sculpture park, I ask you? I certainly wouldn't know.
So did you find it overwhelmingly saccharine and cloyingly sentimental ? That's my impression of such 19th-c. life-imitating-art settings, but then again I'm an obnoxious jerk, and I'm more into anything that qualified as Entartete Kunst (something that was even before my McGill-induced cynicism). Your sand-sculpture punchline is great--did you leave a generous donation for the sculptor (who is awfully optimistic judging by the size of his basket .......) ???
ReplyDeleteNik:
ReplyDelete1. The only thing I found cloying (more like annoying) was all the typical touristy infrastructure: gift shop, ropes and signs, anxious staff running around, etc. But then again, the place receives tonnes of visitors, and I lined up to get in like everyone else. The gardens themselves were a genuine pleasure. Yes, they're picturesque, but the Clos Norman is more a casual cottagy-type garden, and the Water Garden is just too tasteful to be unforgiving (as a reference to the exotic, the Japanese bridges are pretty muted).
Monet may have been creating "pretty" paintings in this period, but at least they were good and even interesting, as was this garden, and it's not like he'd rejected everything he'd discovered in his earlier, "avant-garde" days. Besides, the dude (a grocer's son) was tired of being poor: Is that any less honest than rejecting middle-class origins to be an uncompromising bohemian?
2. You're not an obnoxious jerk. Just... strongly opinionated for an Ontario boy. This makes you not-boring. :)
3. €1.00. They were also selling farm-fresh eggs, but I chose not to.