GC Claude Monet The Artist's Garden at Giverny 1900

Claude Monet The Artist's Garden at Giverny Greetings Card

It is one of many works by the artist of his garden at Giverny over the last thirty years of his life. The painting shows rows of irises in various shades of purple and pink set diagonally across the picture plane. The flowers are under trees that in allowing dappled light through change the tone of their colours. Beyond the trees is a glimpse of Monet's house.

Born in Paris, the son of a grocer, Monet grew up in Le Havre. Contact with Eugène Boudin in about 1856 introduced Monet to painting from nature. He was in Paris in 1859 and three years later he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. Edouard Manet was an influence on his figure compositions of the 1860s, while the informal style of his later landscapes originated in works such as 'Bathers at La Grenouillère', painted in 1869 when Monet worked with Renoir at Bougival.

Monet was the leading French Impressionist landscape painter. Like Camille Pissarro and Charles-François Daubigny, Monet moved to London during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1). After his return to France he lived at Argenteuil (1871-8).