Monet's Giverny, Teo's Givnology, "artists share impressions of color and light"

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http://giverny.org
Claude Monet, the painter who founded the Impressionist school lived in Giverny for 43 years.

His house and his garden, the village of Giverny and its surroundings, were his subject matter and they still attract half a million visitors each year from all over the world, as well as painters, charmed by the unique light of the Seine Valley.

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[QB]Monet's Years at Giverny[/QB] Beyond Impressionism, page 11
Monet's oeuvre is so extensive that its very ambition and diversity challenge our understanding of its importance. His paintings, executed over a period of nearly seventy years, weave a fabric as seamless as that of the late Water Lilies canvases. Yet this continuity was constantly enriched by innvation. The objective, early works of the precocious student of Boudin, which defined Impressionism in the 1860s, and the last paintings of the watergarden in the 1920s, with their mastery of abstraction as a means of personal expression, appear the distinct products of two separate centuries. To understand the degree to which Monet's paintings are a bridge--paralleled only by those of Cezanne--between Impressionist and twentieth-century painting, the work done at Giverny is of critical importance.

Before he moved to Giverny, Monet lived and worked at Le Havre, Sainte-Adresse, Argenteuil, Paris, Louveciennes, Vetheuil--all practically synonymous with the history of Impressionism. None of these places held his attention as did Giverny, where he settled in 1883 and where he died in 1926..

page 16
Psychologists will someday compare Monet and Renoir, who had so much in common in the early days at La GrenouillÈre, a resort on the Siene where they each painted. What motivations dictated their later development? The one was captivated by the female body in all its naked splendor, and the other almost always dwelt on the landscape, to which he subordinated his tentative figures. Monet exhorted the young American painter Lila Cabot Perry to remember that "every leaf on the tree is as important as the features of your model." Yet he might not have become exclusively a landscape painter had it not been for Alice HoschedÉ; his only female models were the HoschedÉ girls, whom he painted with felicitous results, but never in the nude..

page 24
In his bedroom Monet proudly showed off his collection of paintings by friends: Boudin, Manet, Berthe Morison, Renoir, Pissarro, CÉ and Degas..

page 32
Another innovation was the unity of the series, which was "vast as night and clarity," as in a verse by Baudelaire. His name, along with those of MallarmÉ and Debussy, was to become associated with Monet's..

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http://www.etrav.com/pathways/html/giverny.asp
Impressionism flowed from the tails of Realism. Realism was an attempt to "open a window to the world" by painting reality. But the impressionistic painters were sick and tired of the traditional techniques and boring "proper" methods. They were more interested in capturing a general "impression" as you would a passing mood. Impressionism was a serious, objective study of reflected light and reality. It is joked (and it is true) that Monet waited for days until the lighting for his scenes were just right. This is why if you come up nose to nose with an Impressionist painting, you will be shocked to see reds beside blues and greens on top of yellows. As you step back from the painting, you gasp in awe that such messy marks could catch the sense of light in a scene like a twinkle in an eye.

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http://www.providencerest.org/mural.htm
Monet is a universally beloved artist. Famed for his glorious Impressionist paintings, and in particular, for his water lilies, Monet's garden in Giverny (just north of Paris) France is the most visited garden of its size in the western world. The Giverny garden attracts many painters wanting to capture the beauty that Monet considered his greatest work of art.

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