MY PERFECT DAY WITH CLAUDE MONET IN GIVERNY

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece...

My heart is forever in Giverny..."

                                                           Claude Monet

Imagine stepping straight into a painting—into the very heart of a canvas that breathes with riotous color, the scent of flowers, flickers of light and the sweeping, silken strokes of a brush. You have slipped back a few centuries and fused with the creation of a great master at the instant his vast tableau was coming to life. You stroll the same garden paths he once walked, linger in his house, and for a few precious hours—a single day, perhaps—become part of his life and art, forgetting everything that lies beyond this world of color, nature’s perfection, beauty and artistic creation.

For me, visiting Giverny is the fulfilment of a long-nurtured dream. Ever since I first heard of that Norman village and its lovingly preserved garden—kept alive around one of the most celebrated names in painting, the father of Impressionism—I have yearned to see it. Against the edge of time, the place not only endures; it still lives and draws sighs of wonder from visitors around the globe.

Check out my Instagram reel about this breathtaking place

For anyone unfamiliar with this genius: Oscar Claude Monet painted in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. Blessed with a long life, he rose from modest beginnings to wealth and fame, ageing but never ceasing to create. You may know his series Water Lilies, Haystacks, Irises, or individual canvases such as “Woman in a Green Dress,” “La Japonaise,” “The Japanese Bridge,” “Luncheon on the Grass,” or “Saint-Lazare Station.”

Perhaps more famous still is “Impression, Sunrise,” the painting that lent its name to an entire movement—Impressionism. His series of lilies, haystacks and the Rouen Cathedral reveal an obsession with observing the same motif in different hours and seasons, earning him the title “painter of light.” His sense for "making one’s eye perform acrobatics, with a thirst for shimmering colors from which a feverish retina awaits unquenchable joys", as his close friend and the French statesman Georges Clemenceau, described it, was faultless.

Yet the most striking feature of Monet’s oeuvre is not only the vitality, beauty and sunlit warmth of his canvases, but the echo of immeasurable tenderness within them—of extraordinary patience, of passion and an insatiable hunger for color. He aimed to show not merely what he saw, but the intimate space between himself and his subject. Motifs may change, but the impression endures. Imagine an artist who painted his lilies two hundred and fifty times—that is the number recorded; likely there were more, for his severe perfectionism led him to destroy many works—painting the same flowers again and again, each time bathed in different light.

As our guide, Mr Karim, repeated more than once during his account of the painter’s life, “Monsieur Monet was very, very special.”

Despite a prolific career, Monet himself said his greatest masterpiece was his garden.

Whenever he travelled, in his letters he anxiously asked about his flowers - about his chrysanthemums, peonies, ipomoeas, crimson poppies. Were they blooming? Was the temperature kind, the frost kept at bay? Imagine the tenderness, care and love for creation that lived in the heart of this visionary who urged artists to leave their studios, to capture the trembling glint of water and the light that vanishes in a few hours, to flaunt thick, generous daubs of paint and cast off academic, historical or religious subjects in pursuit of a pure impression of the instant.

Flowers will not die, the water‑lilies in every color of the painter’s palette will not disappear, the people in his paintings will live forever, I mused while wandering his garden. His desire to rescue what he loved from oblivion ran so deep that he preserved his models both on canvas and in life, erasing the shadows of death, forgetfulness and transience.

As I walked the paths, I felt honoured—even for a couple of hours—to inhabit this earthly paradise immortalized on canvas: four decades of idyllic life saturated with colour, fragrance and gentleness. A dream realised, though I had not yet fully grasped it. I thanked the universe, God and Monet for that pure, unclouded moment of happiness: I was exactly where I needed to be.

A few weeks before my trip I had painted his house, the thick grass, the flowers and the lilies that surround it, trying to prepare myself, to summon the scene from canvas into my life. Yet nothing on canvas can prepare you for the real view from his terrace, the sun-washed kitchen glazed in an unusually warm lemon-yellow, the pastel pink peeking through deep green, the Japanese details, the blue-and-white tiles that hint at a salty breath of sea air… I will not reveal any more details, for you must experience the beauty and rapture of this place yourself.

I truly believe everyone should, at least once, feel the instant when art and life flow together into a single point of eternity, when an artist’s soul intertwines with nature—an era of visionary creation that continues to inspire. This garden is a refuge for all of us who believe that when everything else fades, only love and art remain. Monet’s garden proves the power of a painter’s love for his fragile, delicate models, which he saved from certain death. He surely knew that only what is pure within the artist—in the human being—can survive, and from that purity authentic art is born.

You need not be an art connoisseur to sense, on an emotional, personal and spiritual level, the majesty of this place.

P. S. Take a fragment of its magic with you: the gift shop at the exit sells seeds from the garden and rich literature on the painter’s life. And if, like me, you visit Giverny in summer, be sure to cool down with the homemade ice cream sold nearby. I will say no more—only urge you, wholeheartedly, to add this haven to your list of future journeys.