The artist's garden at Giverny

Claude Monet's 'The Artist's Garden at Giverny' (1900) continues his sustained, multi-decade investigation of the garden he had created at Giverny — the garden as both personal creation and primary artistic subject becoming the dominant concern of his final decades. By 1900 the garden at Giverny had been developing for nearly two decades, the water garden with its Japanese bridge fully established, and Monet's engagement with the garden's seasonal and daily transformations had produced many of his most celebrated works. His garden series represented a new kind of art — the creation of an environment specifically as a painting subject.

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.