French Impressionist Gardens
The Flowering Worlds of Monet, Manet and Caillebotte
© Meg Nola
Jun 1, 2008
Monet and Giverny
The French Impressionists are famous for their still lifes and lovely landscapes, particularly the artwork of Claude Monet. Monet’s series of water lilies and well-known Japanese bridge paintings originated from his French home in Giverny, just a short trip away from Paris. Initially, Monet was renting the house at Giverny, following a long stretch of financial worries and the death of his wife Camille in 1879. By 1890 he was able to purchase the property and develop it as his own, and it would become a source of inspiration and replenishment for not only Monet but for other artists who came to visit, such as American painters John Singer Sargent and Willard Metcalf.
Monet did not care for structured or planned gardens and instead insisted on letting flowers grow as they wanted to, arranging them only by color. He was inspired to design plans for a water garden by his admiration for Japanese prints, which he studied intently and kept around his studio, though he never actually visited Japan. As he became more successful, he was also able to spend more on rare plants and flowers for both the main and water garden areas. “All my money goes into my garden,” he admitted freely, a passion for natural beauty that would extend beyond his own lifetime. Monet died at Giverny in 1926, and his home and gardens are still major tourist attractions.
Manet’s Passion for Peonies
Painter Edouard Manet never formally allied himself with the French Impressionists, though he was friends with several of the artists and shared some of their techniques. He also shared their love of natural and particularly floral beauty. Manet’s favorite flower was reportedly the peony, with its many petals and heady blooms, and besides making them a focal point of a number of his works, he also liked to grow peonies himself in his garden. The flowers worked well with Manet’s characteristically blunt brushstrokes, and beyond his 1864 Peonies, he included them in his painting of the nude Olympia, which shocked the contemporary Paris art world. The younger French artist Frederic Bazille was a great fan of Manet, and in tribute to Manet’s distinct style and fondness for peonies – and in support of Olympia – Bazille painted Young Woman with Peonies (1870), which expanded a smaller element of Manet’s painting and specifically included a basket of the lovely flowers.
Gustave’s Garden
Gustave Caillebotte was another French Impressionist who found joy in gardening. Rather nurturing by nature, the well-to-do Caillebotte often supported his Impressionist friends and purchased their works in order to help them make ends meet. Caillebotte had a passion for breeding orchids, and he also would exchange new species of plants and flowers with Claude Monet, each sharing their healthy horticultural obsessions and helping the other to beautify his world. Furthermore, as a painter who actually put his hands in soil and studied the immediate structure of flowers – roots and all – Caillebotte’s 1893 work Chrysanthemums, Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers has been noted as being an expert depiction of these blooms, not arranged in the customary still-life vase but in their natural, earthbound state. Ironically or perhaps fittingly, Gustave Caillebotte died at age 45 in 1894, while out working in his garden.
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