The artist's garden at Giverny

The Artist's Garden at Giverny from 1900 at the Musée d'Orsay depicts the flower garden Monet had been cultivating for nearly two decades — by 1900 the most fully developed and elaborately planted garden in France, its annual rotation of bulbs, annuals, and perennials planned with the same systematic attention he brought to his serial painting projects. The garden and the paintings were parallel creative projects: Monet planned both with the gardening staff he employed specifically to maintain the visual effects he required. The 1900 views of the garden represented a retrospective assessment of the project at its height, made in the same years as the first formal water garden paintings — the two gardens (the flower garden crossing the road to the water garden) together constituting his most complete artistic creation. The Orsay holds this canvas as the national museum's representative of the Giverny garden subjects, situating it within the comprehensive survey of French Impressionism that is the Orsay's defining institutional mission. By 1900 the garden had become known beyond France through reproductions and visitors' accounts, and Monet was beginning to receive international recognition as both painter and horticulturalist.

Monet renders the Giverny garden with the loose, atmospheric brushwork of his mature series approach — the specific plants, paths, and light conditions of the garden at a particular moment captured through the summary, expressive touch that sought the essential atmospheric impression over detailed description. His palette in the garden subjects reflects the specific seasonal color of the garden's flowers and foliage, each painting creating a chromatic unity appropriate to its particular moment within the garden's seasonal cycle.