In Monet’s garden

We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans

Whoever coined the famous aphorism ‘When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ didn’t tell the full story. For American plein-air painters, Paris was never more than limbo. Heaven, they eventually discovered, was Giverny, presided over by the Impressionist deity Monet.

It was 1887 when the first American scouts came to reconnoitre the small Normandy village 80 kilometres down the Seine. They reported back to Paris, and within a few summers Monet’s rural retreat was infested with artists’ studios and the fields around were sprouting clumps of painters’ white umbrellas. The locals, who regarded Monet— a middle-class Frenchman from the wrong end of Normandy — as an outsider and delighted in obstructing his painting plans at every turn, opened their houses to these proper foreigners and converted the village grocer into an inn. Monet’s response to the invaders was less enthusiastic. A privileged few were admitted to his circle — one of them, Theodore Butler, married his stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé. But increasingly he avoided the mushrooming umbrellas by finding subjects within the walls of his garden.

Monet had found the Maison du Pressoir with its vast walled garden in 1883, when hunting for a property big enough to house his unconventional ménage à dix with Alice Hoschedé and their combined children. The garden was a boxy French bourgeois affair of regimented yew avenues and privet hedges, but Monet — alongside his fondness for London fog, British tweed and an English breakfast — shared the Anglo-Saxon taste for floral exuberance bordering on anarchy. With advice from the keen gardener Gustave Caillebotte, who used to visit from Argenteuil in his yacht, Monet broke up the formal geometry with a riot of flowers profusely planted in beds and borders, trained up trellises and, after the excavation of the lily pond, suspended on water.