Claude Monet in the Garden
Haystacks and poplars, Gothic cathedrals and Venetian views. After exploring several of Monet's most prominent series, we finally turn to his beloved garden at Giverny.
This is the fourth essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.
Claude Monet moved to the house in Giverny in 1883.
The people of Giverny, a small village in Normandy, were no doubt scandalized by the artist’s living arrangements. His wife Camille had passed away in 1879, and his mistress Alice Hoschedé now resided with Monet and all of their children from their separate marriages. To make matters worse, Alice’s husband, the former department store magnate Ernest Hoschedé, was still alive. (For some years, the Monets and the Hoschedés all lived together after Ernest went bankrupt in 1877. In a rather peculiar arrangement, Alice nursed Camille before she died at the age of thirty-two.)
Monet chose the property in Giverny as a place in which the families could settle after years of instability. He would be a renter in the beginning; it wouldn’t be until after the success of his Haystacks and Poplars series that he coul…
