The garden and the house of Monet in Giverny were both turn into museums. In the house you can see the different rooms where Monet ate, slept or cleaned himself but the most interesting parts are his workshop and all the art he was inspired from. Among those you can admire a lot of Japanese etchings. The gardens of Monet are divided in two parts, the earth garden and the water garden. The two of them are separated by a little underground tunnel. It changes drastically made were the colors from cool tones to warm tones.
Monet did not use many earthy colors such as browns and nudes. He focused mainly on cool tones like blues, and greens to give off a soothing and relaxing mood as he felt when he was in his garden. In this painting there are willow trees beside the water, but it isn't a complete picture of them. It is just the refelection on the water and the low hanging leaves close to the water that tell us.
In Monet bought a plot of land next to his house in Giverny. He enlarged the existing pond, filling it with exotic new hybrid water lilies, and built a humpback bridge at one end, inspired by examples seen in Japanese prints.
Here, the bridge spans the width of the canvas but is cut off at the edges so that it seems to float unanchored above the water, its shape reflected in a dark arc at the bottom of the picture. The perspective seems to shift; it is as though we are looking up at the bridge but down on the water lilies which float towards the distance. The vertical reflections of the trees provide a counterpoint to the horizontal clumps of the lily pads.
For Monet, gardens offered a refuge from the modern urban and industrial world, although he and his fellow garden enthusiasts benefited from modern advances in botanical science that were creating new hybrid flowers in a wide choice of shapes and colours that could be produced on an almost industrial scale.
He made modest gardens in the homes he rented in Argenteuil and Vetheuil in the s, but from , when he moved to a rented house in Giverny, about 50 miles to the west of Paris, he had more scope to indulge his passion for plants. He became a dedicated gardener with an extensive botanical knowledge, and sought the opinions of leading horticulturalists. He was able to buy the house in , and three years later he purchased an adjacent plot of land next to the river Epte beyond the railway line at the edge of his property.
The idea may have occurred to him after he had seen the water garden at the Exposition Universelle in Paris created by the grower Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, who bred the first colourful hardy waterlilies. Monet began by requesting permission from the Prefect of the Eure to dig irrigation channels from the Ru — a branch of the Epte — to feed his pond, but the Giverny villagers objected, fearing it would contaminate the water and that the foreign plants would poison their cattle.
Monet was furious, but three months later permission came through and he began to enlarge the existing pond, replacing the wild water lilies with Latour-Marliac hybrids available in yellows, pinks, whites and violets. The pond was enlarged on further occasions — in and — tripling the size of the water garden.
While the Clos Normand garden was laid out along fairly traditional lines, harking back to the formal French gardens of seventeenth-century Europe, with a central alleyway and geometrically arranged beds, the water garden was more Eastern in inspiration.
Its less regimented, more natural design and more muted colours created a quieter, meditative atmosphere. Monet erected a Japanese bridge over the western end of the pond that took its inspiration from the bridges in ukiyo-e Japanese prints. Monet had to wait for his water garden to mature before he could begin to paint it in earnest. It takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation — how wonderful my pond was — and reached for my palette.
Around of these represent water lilies floating on the surface of the water, while the remainder also show the Japanese bridge, the weeping willow trees and wisteria and the irises, agapanthus and day lilies on its banks. The National Gallery has three further paintings of the water garden : Water-lilies, setting sun ; Irises ; and Water-lilies. Monet painted three views of the Japanese bridge in , not long after it had been constructed, but then took a break from the subject, only returning to it in By now the pool was overhung by vegetation and surrounded by plants, but to judge from contemporary photographs it was never as enclosed as Monet painted it, and he exaggerated the feeling of claustrophobia.
In he urged the artist to work on a larger project, which became a formal state commission in This was for a set of large canvases depicting water lilies that would be displayed together permanently. Between now and his death this was to be the main preoccupation of Monet's work. The deterioration of his eyesight was horrifying to the artist, who wrote, 'I realized with terror that I could see nothing with my right eye.. It's in vain that they tell me it's not serious, that after the operation I will see os before, I'm very disturbed and anxious,' In he was operated on three times to try and correct his right eye.
The brilliant fiery reds and yellows of Water Lilies - Japanese Bridge , are indicative of the impaired sight of the artist, seeing his bridge within a reduced palette. Yet it is the most evocative sum of color and light and composition, creating on overall startlingly emotive effect.
By the time of Monet's death in the art world, both in Paris and in America, was a very different place from the one he had largely struggled against during much of his life, Monet and his circle were the first to truly challenge the conventions of Parisian art in the modern age, and by doing so and progressing their works towards greater understanding of color and light, they opened the door for successive generations of artists.
Monet and his contemporaries broke down barriers and persevered in their artistic quest against great hardship in order to achieve a freedom of expression that is now taken for granted. Towards the end of his life, Monet's work increasingly reflected a form of abstraction through his simplification of composition and reduction of all unessential elements. By doing this ond through his obliquely structured compositions ond focus on pure vivid colour, he set a precedent for later artists, particularly those of the Post-impressionist, Expressionist and Abstract-expressionist movements.
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