Rejoicing in the beauty of a flower or a picturesque landscape often makes us feel like we, ourselves, are bursting into bloom. Every flower has a “deva”, a “higher spirit” possessing a mysterious power of attraction that can be further intensified by the spiritual aura of artworks. Like Claude Monet’s Giverny and his paintings, this gift book series, too, emanates its own, unique scent. While the subtle color shades of flowers often exceed our imagination, artworks and poems have one advantage over them: They do not wilt. We can lean back and enjoy their emotionally charged beauty any time.

See our art gift book series “CONGRATULATIONS!” (Relaxing with flowers, colors, poetry and art)

It was a trip that inspired Claude Monet to create his radiant garden in Giverny. After traveling through the night, the flower fields in Holland appeared before his eyes like a bright sea of colours, in which the blossoming individual flowers simultaneously dissolved and fully unfolded. The artist loved the colors of the landscape and the reflections of tulips in the canals. It was probably the distinctive composition of the tulip fields that inspired the design of his flower beds at Giverny. Apart from Antibes, Venice, London, Norway and Brittany, Monet mainly painted in Normandy: In Étretat and Rouen, as well as in Giverny, where he finally found a haven with his modernist late work in his art-inspired garden.

There is probably no other artist whose works come so close to floating sounds and flowery scents as Claude Monet’s. The subtle color shades of the petals are represented by symphonies of colored dots. Also Monet’s garden art is composed as purposefully as a musical score. Claude Debussy took up the painter’s ideas in his compositions “Reflets dans l‘eau“ (“Reflections in the Water”) und “La mer” (“The Sea”). Like Monet, the composer made different color shades blend into each other at the threshold of modernity. Equally, his prélude „La cathédrale engloutie“ evokes the misty atmosphere and the bright sunlight of Monet’s famous series of cathedral paintings produced in Rouen at different times of the day. Monet saw the cathedral with its delicate rosette not as a religious but as a purely aesthetic form. Only after he had consciously taken in the motif and reflected on it for a long time did the artist feel capable of creating the “Cathedrals”. This artistic recipe would help him later in his pursuit of uncovering the secrets of his water lily pond at Giverny.

En plein air – On painting under open skies, on fragrant flowers and music

Visitors to Monet’s garden will immediately feel drawn into the world of his paintings. The essential work of land art was clearly designed to be painted; the dialogue between the „living with colors“ or rather the interior of the house and the garden is palpable. The chrome yellow dining room seems to emanate the exotic aroma of lemons and the radiance of Monet’s “Sunflowers” (1880), while the blue kitchen evokes images of cornflowers. Today, its unique microcosm lives on in the rhythm of its flowering seasons and the colorful interior of the country house. While the flower garden is dominated by straight lines, the water garden abounds with curves and arches. The garden by the house brims with flowers, while the water landscape brings out the foliage of the trees. Flowers possess a lyrical aura; trees are said to be antennae connected with the universe.

Monet owned an extensive botanical library. He was in the habit of ordering unusual plants from all over the world and was enchanted with his orchids, among other specimens. His comprehensive collection of Japanese woodblock prints on show in the blue room today was also a source of inspiration for his art, and can be seen as a link between his country house and his water garden. The bold flower compositions from the Meiji period (1868 – 1912) among them seem to emanate an especially exotic aura. It was these works that inspired the artist to plant his bamboo grove and create the lily covered pond that has become so famous. The Japanese bridge veiled in the floating scent of wisteria became the dominant motif of several of Monet’s painting cycles.

Together with his friends Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, he left the strict academic rules behind. It was Monet’s famous view of Le Havre “Impression. Sunrise” from 1872 shown at one of the group’s first independent exhibitions that gave the new art movement of impressionism its name. In Claude Monets works, objects are almost immaterialized and taken to the edge of abstraction. This makes them the groundbreaking basis of modern painting.

After effecting a first significant change in the world of art as a leading impressionist, the water lily pond he had created added another, meditative dimension to his art. Throughout the last 18 years of his life, he worked almost exclusively on this motif. This finally led to another art historical breakthrough: Monet invented an almost abstract style of painting aimed at representing light and spherical space, achieved in an installation lit by daylight. It was his friend Georges Clemenceau who, after Monet’s death, unveiled the nymphéas (water lilies) cycle at the Musée National de l‘Orangerie des Tuileries, a small skylit museum in the gardens of the Louvre. Monet had officially gifted his pioneering art installation to the French State.

See also:

• Art book “Flowers for Monet”
• Flower festivals, artists’ houses and garden art arround the world