By: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Recently the Los Angeles Times reviewed Le Jardin des Plumes, a hotel and restaurant in Giverny, France, which opened in 2012. Besides the wonderful food and picturesque grounds it boasts, the hotel also offers visitors and art lovers a chance to stay in Giverny–to experience the garden and explore Monet’s house without the crowded tourist bus schedule.
Just 40 miles west of Paris, Giverny is a small Norman village on the Seine, made most famous by Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Monet spent the last 43 years of his life there, surrounded by his lush gardens, living and painting in his remodeled farmhouse with brightly painted walls and minimal interiors.
Monet’s Giverny has become a destination of sorts, not just because he lived and died there, but more so because of his expansive series of paintings and light studies completed over the latter half of his life. William C. Seitz noted that Monet’s Meadow at Giverny is the “first of his well-known series–cycles of related canvases representing a single subject under varying conditions of light, atmosphere, and sometimes seasons.”…