The story of this place
In 1883 Claude Monet rented a house at Giverny in Normandy, buying it in 1890 as Impressionism made him prosperous. There he became a gardener as much as a painter, diverting a stream to create a water garden with a lily pond and an arched Japanese bridge draped in wisteria. For the last thirty years of his life these gardens were his sole subject: he painted some 250 canvases of the water lilies, the Nymphéas, culminating in the vast wraparound panels he gave to France to celebrate the 1918 Armistice, now in the Orangerie in Paris. Nearly blind with cataracts in his final years, he painted on until his death here in 1926.