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. For the first ten years he tended the garden himself with the help of his extended family, but as his income grew, so did his horticultural ambitions. By the end he was employing a head gardener and five assistants, including one with a boat to maintain the pond.
The change in Monet’s fortunes, like the change in Giverny, was largely due to American enthusiasm. It was after his dealer Durand-Ruel took 50 of his paintings to New York in 1886 that sales of the artist’s work took off. (He got no thanks from Monet, who didn’t like his pictures or his stepdaughters leaving France.) A century later it was American money, once again, that saved his house and garden from dereliction. When the Académie des Beaux-Arts, heir to the Monet estate, asked one of its members, Gérald van der Kemp, to intervene in 1977, trees were growing up through the Atelier des Nymphéas and the banks of the lily pond had been undermined by tunnelling guinea pigs, or ‘rats américains’ as they’re locally known.
Van der Kemp, who with his American wife had created the Versailles Foundation in New York to raise funds to restore Versailles, expanded its brief to cover Giverny and money poured in. With the aid of photographs, plant order forms and the memory of a former assistant to nurseryman Georges Truffaut, who had lunched with Monet once a week to discuss his needs, the gardens were restored to their former glory. Another American philanthropist, Walter Annenberg, solved the problem of access to the water garden across what was now a busy road by funding an underpass. (Monet had previously had the road tarred over to stop dust settling on his water lilies.)
Monet used to travel down from Paris on the local stopper that ran alongside the road through his garden. Now you take the Monet motif express from the Gare Saint-Lazare to Rouen, get off at Vernon and transfer to a shuttle bus. How authentic is the experience? Giverny’s new English head gardener James Priest prefers the word ‘adaptation’ to ‘recreation’. In the garden the only survivors from Monet’s time are the two yews marking the entrance to the grande allée and one of the weeping willows overhanging the pond. Monet’s favourite yellow Mermaid rose has been replanted beneath his window, and the pink and red geraniums in a bed facing the main door are authenticated by the artist’s presence in an early colour photograph. But with 500,000 visitors a year tramping the garden’s concrete paths and the reflections of willow fronds among the lily pads jostled by the reflections of red anoraks, the atmosphere is hard to recapture. And I went on a relatively quiet day, the sort of rainy day when Monet would have gone back to bed. There were moments when the vista emptied, a breath of wind stirred the herbaceous border and you could imagine yourself in the company of the maître taking an après-déjeuner tour fortified by coffee and homemade plum brandy served in the studio-salon, but they were brief.
Fortunately, solace is at hand for the frustrated tourist, thanks again to American philanthropy. In 1980 the printing ink tycoon and collector Daniel J. Terra opened a Musée d’Art Americain in Giverny to show exhibitions of American Impressionists. Three years ago the Terra Foundation handed the building over to the local authorities, and it has been reborn as the Musée des Impressionismes. Nestled discreetly into the hillside on the other side of the Rue Claude Monet and camouflaged by its own gardens, the museum is easy to miss, but it vaut le détour all on its own.
With the support of the Musée d’Orsay, it has embarked on a wide-ranging and ambitious programme of exhibitions intended, in the words of its young director Diego Candil, to ‘décloisonner l’impressionisme’ and reveal the movement’s connections with other periods and national schools (hence the plural, less of a mouthful in French). Last year it showed Bonnard in Normandy, next year it plans an exhibition of Maurice Denis and this summer it has pulled off the considerable coup of being the only French venue for the touring exhibition of Great French Paintings from the Clark Collection — formed by the American Singer sewing-machine heir Sterling Clark and his French wife, Francine — which comes to the Royal Academy next year. Among the works on show are six by Monet and several by his sometime guests at Giverny, Renoir, Degas, Bonnard and American in Paris Mary Cassatt.
From Monet’s perspective Americans may have been the ruin of Giverny, but they have since been the remaking of it. For a genuine reminder of how Giverny was, however, go to ‘Spring in Giverny’ (1890) in the Clark Collection. The painting’s breezy view of feathery pink-tipped poplars casting shallow spring shadows on lush green water meadows breathes an air of undisturbed bucolic solitude. The location, thinks Candil, is behind (if not under) the present shuttle bus park. For preserving memories, oil on canvas is best. A recreation can never be more than an adaptation — the only things that remain unchanged are pictures.
La Collection Clark à Giverny, de Manet à Renoir at the Musée des Impressionismes and Monet’s House and Garden are open until 31 October.
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