Giverny Blooms in the Bronx

The market for Claude Monet’s paintings faltered in the 1880s but came back the following decade, when he started producing series like the haystacks and the Rouen Cathedral facades. He began to make a lot of money, enough to finance his own private utopia in Giverny in northern France, where he devoted himself to flower gardening with as much industry and creativity as he did to painting. From 1883 to the end of his life in 1926, initially as a renter, he presided over his aesthetic Eden, his paradise for the innocent eye, and there created some of the most adventurous works on canvas of the early 20^th century: the enveloping, hallucinatory paintings of lily pads floating on the surface of the pond he excavated for them.

More