Impressionists

Last year, one of my favorite art projects with Heather Parker was the classes on Impressionist art.  Those were the beautiful pictures that you did that later were auctioned at the Empty Bowl Preview night.  Several of you chose to copy paintings by Monet, who was one of the first painters to paint in the Impressionist style.
In fact the name Impressionism came from a painting he did called Impression -Sunrise.  Art critics at first didn't like this style, saying it was hard to tell what the painting were, they were just "impressions" of things.
Monet and his friends who liked this style and began to use it more and more had the last laugh, since they are all famous now!  The painting by Monet is now in the Musee Marmottan, which Pops and I visited last week.

Impression - Sunrise

We were on an Impressionist roll then, so we decided to visit the place where Monet did a lot of his painting. Claude Monet lived in a town called Giverny, which is about 50 miles from Paris.  He had his second wife had 8 kids between them so he lived in a large house with a huge yard.  His two favorite things were gardening and painting, so his yard was filled with gorgeous flower gardens, paths, and ponds.  He wanted his garden to be like a painting, with the colors blending and something blooming almost all year round.  Many of his paintings were done in his garden. including huge murals of water lillies.  Believe it or not, it was unusual for painters to paint outside before then.  Most painters stayed in their art studios and while they may have gone outside to sketch or observe things, they did all their painting inside.  That Monet was really a rebel!

Monet's home in Giverny is beautiful.  Even though the gardens are over 100 years old they are still gorgeous.  We took a tour of his house, which is pretty big - of course, there were eight kids living there!
Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures on the inside, but I bought some postcards to show you.  His kitchen looks a lot like Mrs. McCauley's!