Monet's famous garden is always colorful

Touring Giverny - Inspiration of an Impressionist Master

The gardens that Claude Monet designed and painted are famous the world over. Monet moved to this Norman farmhouse in 1883 and lived here until his death in 1926. The charming yellow dining room still radiates with the warmth of the many family suppers served here and prepared in the blue tiled kitchen, both vibrant with the colors Monet immortalized in his paintings. A visit here is both a visit with the spirit of the painter, and a step into an impressionist painting. You can share his vision of light and movement as you walk through his gardens beautiful in any season and around the lily pond and its famous Japanese bridge. You can view Monet’s personal collection of Japanese woodblock prints and feel his presence as you visit the salon where he entertained so many powerful and famous figures from France and throughout Europe.

	Monet’s many paintings of waterlilies are among the most famous of his many impressionist works that transformed the western artistic vision. Primarily a landscape artist, Monet, along with other young painters in the Paris of the 1860s and 70s, rejected the stuffiness and formality of the older styles of painting in favor of a new, more modern style that was looser, more colorful and more spontaneous. Monet saw both the tensions and the excitement of the modern world.
	We will meet you at your hotel and drive you to Giverny through the lovely Norman landscape that so captured Monet’s imagination. En route, we will stop in Vétheuil, where he lived for years with his first wife Camille, and where she is buried. Arriving in Giverny, we will visit the home where Monet lived for forty-three years, and where he enjoyed a rich family life with his second wife, his children and step children. A tour of the American Museum housing original works of the many American painters Monet influenced will follow lunch at a restaurant of your choice in the town that became a site of artistic pilgrimage even before Monet’s death.
	A visit to Giverny can be arranged in various ways to suit your personal schedule and interests. The route from Paris can take you non-stop along the autoroute to arrive in approximately an hour from the city center, or you can take the slower and smaller roads, stopping to see places where Monet painted from his studio boat and the towns along the way like Vétheuil that he knew and painted. Lunch can be either in Giverny or in near-by Vernon, coupling the visit to Monet’s home with a tour of the town’s fifteenth century buildings and the chateaux in the vicinity.

Pricing and Availability

June to August 10: Daily except Monday including Saturday, Sunday and holidays.

April, May, September and October:: Saturdays, Sundays. Weekdays only by special appointment.

Customized chauffeur-driven and guided full-day tours include time for lunch and a coffee break in the afternoon and in the morning if you wish. You will be met and returned to your hotel. All tours are in air-conditioned comfort. Tours for parties larger than three guests will be in an air-conditioned van. At least a half-day tour is necessary if the house and gardens are to be visited, but full day tours can take in other sites in the vicinity as well as the American Museum in Giverny.

Fees: $150 per person.

Prices include the chauffeur/guide, transportation and entrance fees, autoroute tolls, and all but meals and refreshments.

Related Tours

• Vernon - old town visited by Turner and John Singer Sargent as well as by Monet and by the American army who bridged the Seine here in August 1944. The Chateau de Bizy on the edge of town was involved in the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as well as the central events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• La Roche Guyon - First constructed in the 1100s, the chateau was expanded in the eighteenth century, and the headquarters of German Marshall Erwin Rommel during the Battle of Normandy in the twentieth. A visit to the three levels of the chateau, home of the La Rochefoucauld family, introduces you to fascinating personalities from each of these centuries. Their stories reflect the drama of individual lives in some of history’smost traumatic events.
• Les Andelys - These two connected towns offer charming shops, boutiques, restaurants and hotels along with the ruins of Richard the Lion-Heart’s Chateau Gaillard dominating the view from the cliffs above the towns. A visit to the site provides dramatic views of the Norman countryside for miles around.