Beautiful morning in Giverny

September 1st, I picked up a party of 6 at the port of le Havre and drove them to Giverny, to visit the village and Monet’s house and gardens. The weather was beautiful and our timing was good to skip the crowds and take our time in the gardens.

Here are the other 2 photos.  We had a lovely day trip with you.  The others in our group really enjoyed the day and thanked me for arranging this tour. Jean

All what you wanted to know about Claude Monet’s most famous masterpiece: At the Musée Marmottan, Paris

The Impression, Soleil Levant is almost surely  one of Monet’s most-loved works, and one of the highlights of the Marmottan’s collection. Yet the painting is shrouded in mystery –  as is its   subject:  the port at Le Havre,  cloaked in mist.  Does the piece depict a sunrise or sunset? How and why did it end up at the museum in 1940? And could it have been the work that christened the Impressionist movement?

To mark the 80th anniversary of the museum’s opening, and the 140th anniversary of the first display of Monet’s majestic creation, the Musée Marmottan Monet  unveils  the true story behind the masterpiece.

The exhibition will take you  through 25 stunning paintings by Monet, as well as 55 works from other great figures – including Eugène Delacroix, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Turner and Berthe Morisot,  to name a few – generously lent by museums and other institutions from across the globe.

The exhibits have been grouped so as to put the painting  within the context of artistic developments of the time, notably the long-standing popularity of the sunrise-sunset motif and Monet’s own personal fascination with the port at Le Havre. The exhibition also looks into the display of Soleil Levant at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, before shedding light on the intriguing tale of how the Marmottan came to own the work in 1940.

Monet at the Musée Marmottan, Paris

The work that clinched the identity of western art’s first self-consciously avant-garde movement was Monet’s “Impression, soleil levant”, shown at the inaugural Salon breakaway exhibition of the “Anonymous Society of Painters” in 1874. “I had submitted something done in Le Havre, from my window, the sun in the mist and a few masts of ships,” Monet recalled. “They asked me the title for the catalogue: it could not really pass for a view of Le Havre, so I replied, ‘Put Impression’. From that came ‘Impressionism’, and the jokes proliferated.”

The name immediately stuck in the public mind but the now iconic painting did not. It had chequered fortunes, and was not exhibited between the 1880s and 1931. In 1940, it was acquired by Paris’s Musée Marmottan, a marvellously discreet museum on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne – though it did not go on display there until after the war.

The Marmottan went on to acquire the world’s greatest Monet collection: scores of works of intense emotional connection to the artist, bequeathed by his son Michel in 1966. As a result, it rarely bothers with temporary exhibitions – but now an exceptional, erudite, rapturous show recounts the creation, background (works by Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot) and afterlife of its most famous possession: Impression, soleil levant: L’histoire vraie du chef d’oeuvre de Claude Monet.