[Idyllchat] Church in Vernon/Giverny

[Pete and Maggie Haggart]

I agree with Karey's assessment. The house is interesting and the Japanese art work very nice, but it is the gardens and ponds and careful attention to color in the plantings that capture your mind and heart. 

We always will remember sitting on a bench there in October and watching the mist rise from the lilly pond and thinking - "this is what Monet saw and what inspired his paintings!"

There is also a very interesting small art museum in Paris dedicated to his work and you will see works that you never imagined would come from his brushes  - especially during the dark period of his failing eyesight. 

It is called the Musée Marmottan which houses a fine collection of Monet's in a mansion on the fringe of urban Paris.  The collection is outstanding - showing his sketches as a teenager and also 5 angry paintings toward the end of his life when his eyesight was not good due to cataracts (he later had an eye operation that was successful). These paintings were very abstract and with lots of red. They also had at this museum the Monet painting that started an artistic revolution, "Sunrise" and that painting was ridiculed by calling it "wallpaper." The style was dubbed "Impressionist" and the name stuck. Monet often painted the same subject several times under different light and we saw our 7th painting of the Cathedral of Rouen. Monet is said to have worked on up to 14 different canvasses at a time shuffling the right one onto the easel as the sun moved across the sky. 

Enjoy.....................

Pete

Peter and Margaret Haggart
haggart at moscow.com
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Karey Bresenhan 
  To: IdyllChat at lists.untours.com 
  Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 4:19 PM
  Subject: [Idyllchat] Church in Vernon/Giverny


  My husband and I have gone to Monet's Garden every year for almost 10 years.
  We adore it. Thank goodness for digital cameras because we used to go broke
  developing all the film! I second everything that has been said, with one
  exception. I do not walk well and use a cane--bad knees and bad ankles. The
  house is difficult for me, and frankly, the gardens are so much more
  spectacular than the house that I am happy to spend my time and energy with
  the flowers. You can find many books--some pretty inexpensive--that picture
  the inside of the home, enough that if I had it to do over again, I'd just
  buy a book, skip the ordeal of maneuvering inside the house, and go back to
  my flowers! 

  The American Museum there is wonderful and a beautiful showcase for art. It
  has an excellent gift shop, as does Monet's Garden. 

  But there is one thing many, many people miss that is truly spectacular. In
  Vernon (these two towns--Vernon and Giverny--are so close they are like one
  and the same) on top of the hill, looming over everything, is a wonderful
  old church. I am told that during WWII, a German ammunition train was hit by
  Allied bombers just on the outskirts of town, and the resulting explosion
  blew out many of the church's ancient stained glass windows. In the 60's,
  the town or the church commissioned a contemporary glass artist to create
  new stained glass windows for the church. The artist drew upon the flowers
  of Monet's Garden for his inspiration. So as you walk up and down the aisles
  of the church, you find yourself surrounded with the iris, the roses, the
  lilies, all the flowers that are so much a part of not only Monet and his
  work but also of the little towns around that part of France...all depicted
  in gorgeous stained glass. It is well worth your time and small donation you
  might want to make to the church. And you will have seen something very few
  tourists know about. Unfortunately, there is no brochure in English. But you
  can enjoy the windows without reading!

  K Bresenhan

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