“An avenue in Monet’s garden in Giverny”
Today is a wonderful day for color.
“An avenue in Monet’s garden in Giverny”, sometimes called “Path in Monet’s garden in Giverny”, is an oil on canvas painting by the great Claude Monet from 1902. It is one of many pieces he created that depict the flowers and beauty of his home.
In this painting, Monet paints the perspective along the walkway approaching his home. Light dapples the walkway. The canvas is filled with spots of color, from red to purples to greens to whites. It is late summer, and nasturtiums, fuchsia, and dahlias add a variety of colors to the landscape. The foliage on three trellises that pass over the walkway fill in the space at the top of the canvas. Barely visible in the back of the painting is Monet’s home, which is pink with green shutters. Monet had his house painted his favorite color combination after he moved in. The front of the house is covered with trellised flowers and foliage.
Monet was highly successful in his life. Impressionism, which he helped found, soon became mainstream and lucrative and Monet was one of the forefront artists of the movement. In 1883, Monet first moved into what would be his famous house at Giverny, France, northwest of Paris. It was an old farmhouse. He immediately began to modify the landscape around his home to create his now famous gardens. The result is a sprawling and generous creation, more like an English garden with its rambling design and overabundance of flowers and plants.
When Monet had originally moved in, spruce and cypress trees lined the walkway. As he wanted his yard to be filled with flowers and sunlight, against his wife, Alice’s, wishes, he thinned out the trees to allow more sunlight to filter through to his flowers. Monet planted a variety of flowers in purposeful placements, so that one would begin to bloom when another had withered. He also carefully chose the colors of each flower type, planning areas of cool-colored flowers against areas of warm-colored flowers to match the rising and setting of the sun and what time of day the sun would reach the flowers.
In 1890, Monet was able to buy his house in Giverny outright. He immediately began more heavy remodeling of the landscape. In 1893, he bought the plot of land directly next to his home. He redirected a marshy stream to fill in a pond in this adjacent plot and built his now-famous Japanese-style bridge to expand over the stream. Wisteria generously hangs over the bridge, filling in the space with flowers and greenery. Interestingly for us today, Monet was at odds with the town, as he redirected the stream without any prior permission or understanding of how it would modify the natural waterways.
His backyard gave him inspiration for the latter part of his life. Between 1899 and 1926, the last year of his long life, Monet created a large number of pieces based on his garden, including this one here.
“An avenue in Monet’s garden in Giverny”, or “Path in Monet’s garden in Giverny”, is currently in the collections of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, Austria.
For more on Claude Monet, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
