The Main Path at Giverny

Claude Monet

Contemporary-Art.org
Keywords: PathGiverny

Work Overview

Pathway in Monet's Garden at Giverny
Claude Monet
Date: 1900
Style: Impressionism
Genre: landscape


The land is divided into flowerbeds where flower clumps of different heights create volume. Fruit trees or ornamental trees dominate the climbing roses, the long -stemmed hollyhocks and the coloured banks of annuals. Monet mixed the simplest flowers (daisies and poppies) with the most rare varieties.


The central alley is covered over by iron arches on which climbing roses grow. Other rose trees cover the balustrade along the house. At the end of the summer nasturtiums invade the soil in the central alley.


Claude Monet did not like organized nor constrained gardens. He married flowers according to their colours and left them to grow rather freely.


With the passing years he developed a passion for botany, exchanging plants with his friends Clemenceau and Caillebotte.  Always on the look-out for rare varieties, he bought young plants at great expense. "All my money goes into my garden," he said. But also: "I am in raptures."