Music: Reverie by Debussy, played by F. Monet was perhaps the only great artist to create a landscape in order to paint it. The result was a garden that shimmered with flowers and water; a feast for the eyes. My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most is flowers. My heart is forever in Giverny, perhaps I owe it to the flowers that I became a painter.
It was thanks to a wedding that Claude Monet discovered the house at Giverny in the spring of His train made an unscheduled stop to let the wedding party on board and, enchanted by what he saw from the window, Monet disembarked.
Since setting out to become a painter he had been plagued by poverty and debt. And at forty-two he was still in financial difficulty; despite being acknowledged as a leader of the Impressionist painting movement, his reputation was confined to a small circle.
Giverny was then a small community of some three hundred inhabitants, nestled in the Seine valley, forty miles north-west of Paris. The low stone houses covered with faded pink or green stucco were bathed in a soft, luminous light that Monet found irresistable.
There was a sizeable walled garden and an orchard, even a barn that could be used as a studio. He fell in love with it and the owner agreed to rent it to him. With a loan from his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet signed the lease and the family moved in.
