- Giverny, is a Norman village with an exceptional story: Claude Monet arrival’s in 1883 was soon followed by a multitude of painters from America. The daily life of the tiny village changed. Barns became studios, the walls at the Angelina and Lucien Baudy Hotel were covered with dozens of paintings.

It was also a time of feasts, masked balls, and dinners held by candlelight and paper lanterns and of course Thanks Giving lunches. The American painters Butler, Hart, were soon to become close friends to Claude Monet. Easels were to be seen all over the fields and the gardens.

It is the artist’s style of living at the end of XIXth century that Claire Joyce describes in her book, and that one can also discover through Jean Moral’s photographs as well as the Impressionist painter’s fabulous daily testimonies. Discover 30 reciepes inspired by Butler’s cookbook and from the menus of the Hotel Baudy.

“One must absolutely make a pilgrimage to Giverny, to this flowered-sanctuary, to have a better understanding of the master, a better grasp of the source of his inspiration and to imagine him still alive among us” Gerald VAN DER KEMP.

More than a century ago until the beginning of WW1 a colony of American Impressionists painters came to Giverny to explore the aesthetic possibilities of Impressionism.

Although Claude Monet hadn’t encouraged others to follow him, Giverny became a popular destination for international artists and students keen to experiment with the impressionist aesthetic. The American museum celebrating its15 years of existence this year has extended the exhibitsw to 19th American Art and is organizing new exhibitions every other year.

Designed by the architect Ph ROBERT of Reichen and Robert’s, the building closely combines the architecture with the light and the landscape. It harmonizes the junction between art and nature integrating the impressionist painting collection into the surrounding landscape. The museum follows the slope of the hillside and extends in a horizontal manner nestling into a screen of vegetation.

A bright entrance hall welcomes the visitors. Taking the shape of the hill, 3 showrooms on different levels can accommodate the exhibitions including a spacious auditorium used for conferences, films , concerts, and business meetings. At the origin of the Musée d’Art Americain is Daniel J.Terra (1911-1996) Grandson of an Italian lithographer who had emigrated to the US, he graduates in chemistry and made his success taking out a patent for a chemical component which reduced the ink drying process from 96hrs to 24hrs.

In 1940, he founded his company, lawter Chemicals whom fast expansion allowed himself to buy art. Initially he began to collect XVIII and XIX century British landscapes and later exclusively American Art. Daniel Terra’s collection not only fulfilled his personal passion for Art but also his wish to promote and spread abroad the American Art. Appointed State Ambassador-at-large for Cultural Affairs in 1983 he travelled to France and discovered with enthusiasm Giverny’s rich and artistic past.

To make provision of his collection he founded the Terra Foundation for Art. He inaugurated his first museum in 1980 at Evanston Illinois, followed by 2 other museum, one in Chicago in 1987 (now closed down) and the Musée d’Art Americain in Giverny in 1992.

Claude Monet’s property in Giverny was bequeathed by his son Michel to the Beaux Art Academy in 1966 .

Thanks to the generous donations by American and French sponsors and the Conseil General de l’Eure, the property was restored, directed by Mr G VAN DER K of the Institut de France assisted by Mr Gilbert VAHE head gardener,it became the Foundation Claude Monet from 1980.

The house with its rose crepi, was lived in by Monet from 1883 to 1926, has been restored to its original design. In many rooms one can see Monet’s rare etchings in their initial settings. The nympheas studio was also restored. It now houses the Foundation’s shop.

The garden has been restored too and shows the visitors the inspiration for “painting after the nature itself” that Monet’s contemporaries considered masterpieces. In front of the house and the studios, the rectilinear path of the Norman enclosure, with its flowering arches encircled with magnificent bushes offers from spring to autumn the changing palette of a painter-gardener.

Finally, shaded by the weeping willows, the water garden and its famous Japanese bridge, formed by a diversion of the river Epte, it is here that the visitor can admire the wisteria, azaleas, and the pond which becomes again this case of sky and water that gives birth to the pictorial universe of the nympheas.