Music: Reverie by Debussy, played by F. Monet was perhaps the only great artist to create a landscape in order to paint it. The result was a garden that shimmered with flowers and water; a feast for the eyes. My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most is flowers. My heart is forever in Giverny, perhaps I owe it to the flowers that I became a painter. It was thanks to a wedding that Claude Monet discovered the house at Giverny in the spring of His train made an unscheduled stop to let the wedding party on board and, enchanted by what he saw from the window, Monet disembarked.
Since setting out to become a painter he had been plagued by poverty and debt. And at forty-two he was still in financial difficulty; despite being acknowledged as a leader of the Impressionist painting movement, his reputation was confined to a small circle.
Giverny was then a small community of some three hundred inhabitants, nestled in the Seine valley, forty miles north-west of Paris. The low stone houses covered with faded pink or green stucco were bathed in a soft, luminous light that Monet found irresistable. There was a sizeable walled garden and an orchard, even a barn that could be used as a studio. He fell in love with it and the owner agreed to rent it to him.
With a loan from his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet signed the lease and the family moved in. But Ernest lost his fortune. Ernest found work in Paris and virtually abandoned his wife and children; Alice helped Monet to look after the children and nurse Camille through her terminal illness, thought to be cancer.
When Camille died at the age of thirty-two Monet was grief stricken, yet he felt compelled to lock the door and paint her on her deathbed. Forty years later he confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau that. I found myself staring at the tragic countenance, automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportion of light and shade in the colours that death had imposed on the immobile face. Shades of blue, yellow, grey…Even before the thought occurred to memorise the face that meant so much to me, my first involuntary reflex was to tremble at the shock of the colours.
