Laura Gascoigne

In Monet’s garden

We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans

issue 06 August 2011

We owe Giverny to the generosity of Americans

Whoever coined the famous aphorism ‘When good Americans die, they go to Paris’ didn’t tell the full story. For American plein-air painters, Paris was never more than limbo. Heaven, they eventually discovered, was Giverny, presided over by the Impressionist deity Monet.

It was 1887 when the first American scouts came to reconnoitre the small Normandy village 80 kilometres down the Seine. They reported back to Paris, and within a few summers Monet’s rural retreat was infested with artists’ studios and the fields around were sprouting clumps of painters’ white umbrellas. The locals, who regarded Monet— a middle-class Frenchman from the wrong end of Normandy — as an outsider and delighted in obstructing his painting plans at every turn, opened their houses to these proper foreigners and converted the village grocer into an inn. Monet’s response to the invaders was less enthusiastic. A privileged few were admitted to his circle — one of them, Theodore Butler, married his stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé.

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