Easter in Giverny

Easter, Paques, 2012

This Easter weekend, we had the pleasure of welcoming some of our family members from Germany; my dad's aunt, his cousin and his wife. My uncle and aunt (dad's sister) from Auvergne also came. After breakfast this Monday morning (Easter Monday is off in France and is a holiday), I surprised everybody with an Easter hunt. I had bought earlier in the week and secretly hidden before breakfast big chocolate bells and bunnies out in the yard. They were excited, like children, to search for them. After the hunt, we drove to Giverny which is known worldwide, and especially by Americans, as Claude Monet's house and beautiful gardens. Giverny is a small village with no more than 1000 inhabitants, about 50 miles west of Paris.

Claude Monet, the renowned painter, noticed this village while looking out of a train window. He made up his mind to move there and rented a house and the area surrounding it. In 1890 he had enough money to buy the house and land outright and set out to create the magnificent gardens he wanted to paint. Some of his most famous paintings were of his garden in Giverny, famous for its rectangular Clos normand, with archways of climbing plants entwined around colored shrubs, and the water garden, with the Japanese bridge, the pond with the water lily, the wistarias and the azaleas. Monet lived in the house with its famous pink crushed brick façade from 1883 until his death in 1926. He and many members of his family are interred in the village cemetery.

Claude Monet's property at Giverny (house and gardens), left by his son to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1966 became a Museum opened to public visit in 1980 after completion of large-scale restoration work: the huge Nymphea's studio was restored and the precious collection of Japanese engravings was displayed in several rooms, hung in the manner chosen by the master himself, the gardens were replanted as they once were. The house become a popular tourist attraction (the Fondation Claude Monet), particularly in the summer when the flowers are in bloom.