This day trip will lead you from Paris to the edge of Normandy, where you will first visit the idyllic home of Claude Monet.
You will travel in style aboard a luxury minibus with one of our expert guides, so you can sit back, relax and make the most of your day. The leader of the Impressionist School lived here from 1883 to 1926, the colourful décor and pink brick facade are an intimate reminder of its former life. The precious collection of Japanese engravings is displayed in several rooms, hung in the marmer chosen by the master of Giverny himself. Claude Monet’s property at Giverny, left by his son to the Académie des Beaux-arts in 1966, has, after completion of large scale restoration work, become the Claude Monet Foundation, inaugurated in 1980. The huge Nymphéas studio, a stone’s throw from the house, has also been restored and contains the Foundation’s Shop.
The gardens have been replanted as they once were and offer visitors the “painting from nature” which Claude Monet’s contemporaries considered to be one of his masterpieces. The rectangular Clos Normand, with archways of climbing plants entwined around brilliantly coloured shrubs, lies before the house and studios, offering from Spring to Autumn the palette of varying colours to the painter-gardner who was “ecstatic about flowers”. Lastly, the Water Garden, formed by a tributary of the Epte, lies further away, shaded by weeping willows. With its famous Japanese Bridge, its wistarias, azaleas and its pond, it has once more become that casket of sky and water which inspired the pictorial universe of the water lilies.