“I’ve made a terrible mistake in settling down so far away. I’m totally disheartened.” Claude Monet wrote to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in June 1883, shortly after renting the house in Giverny far from the busy art world of Paris.

Up to this time Monet’s work had not been well accepted by critics or collectors. Things began to improve in the 1880s and Monet was able to afford to live away from the city in an area full of interesting views and plenty of light. Monet wanted to study the effects of light and he painted haystacks over and over, in all kinds of light and atmosphere conditions. All the Impressionists were concerned with light–the way it can change from hour to hour or day to day, the idea that material things are known to us only by light

Monet began planting the flower gardens of Giverny and was very involved in the color combinations and views he wanted to paint. His era’s fascination for Japanese woodblocks led him to build a Japanese style footbridge that he painted first without, and then with, the wisteria that he had planted.

The gardens at Giverny came to be his primary inspiration for the remaining forty three years of his life. He was no longer so isolated when, after Monet had been there five years, an artist’s colony was built nearby and important artists of the time came to be his neighbors, including John Singer Sargent and many others.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) devoted his long painting career to the art movement named for one of his paintings. Impressionists was a term a hostile critic coined for the group from the painting “Impression:Sunrise” (1872). The bright sunlit scenes made their eye’s smart, said the conservatives. The dabs of bright color in Monet’s paintings portray the reality of flickering water reflections better than the then (newly invented) art of photography could do.