Stroll through the glorious gardens at Giverny on a unique tour with Claude Monet who spent 45 years cultivating this garden in the image of his painting until the end of his life. With a professional actor-guide interpreting the role of the master painter, you will learn to love Monet’s home and gardens as he did.
One word, “waterlilies” : already you think of Claude Monet’s masterpiece portraits of the floating world of these flowers. You dream of Giverny, their home and that of the artist who planted them here in the ponds with the other greenery and blossoms that lend this garden its transcendent beauty. You will feel like you are walking straight into one of his paintings. Known the world over as Impressionism’s inventor, thus the father of every painter of today, “Papa Monet,” as he had himself called, awaits your presence in his beloved home, a tranquil place of peace and inspiration. There he will let you in on the secrets of his creativity, the changing effect of light, his true muse, how Japanese art inspired him, but also how he spent his days, whether at his brushes or bickering with neighbors, but also simply telling you what he tried to accomplish with oil and pigment.
Not just flowers will open for you, so will the doors to his mind and heart, where you will get to know him as few did in his lifetime, The stories the guide tells as he incarnates Papa Monet, difficult but irresistible genius, all come from those who knew him best, leading lights of turn of the century Paris. The tales were all hard-won as the artist seldom let others into his inner circle. In this tour you will be one of the lucky ones. You will discover his artistic obsessions, his fascination with the luminous, his unending quest to capture it in paint so that his audience could see the beauty and appreciate it as he did. But to capture light with only brush and color, not with a camera, is a challenge indeed. A challenge that Monet took on and accomplished, in canvas after canvas of changing moments of the sun’s surface effects, making him one of the most beloved names in painting still today. His garden will show you why.
Let yourself be taken away from it all into the enchanted world of the artist that he carefully crafted just as much as his pictures, with color, contrast, line and light. A mere skip and a jump away from Paris, his floating world awaits to delight you.
You will make your own way to the meeting points
Please note this tour requires a reasonable amount of walking. Please wear comfortable shoes!