The first is the Claude Monet Foundation, built around the painter's house and his gardens. The house itself is a surprise: far from a sober artist's retreat, it is a celebration of color. The famous yellow dining room, the blue-tiled kitchen, the workshop-living room hung with reproductions of his paintings, and the bedrooms upstairs all reveal a man who treated his home as carefully as a canvas. From the windows you look straight out over the flowers, exactly as Monet did each morning.
Outside, the gardens divide into two contrasting worlds. The Clos Normand, in front of the house, is a walled garden organized in long beds where tulips, irises, peonies, nasturtiums and roses bloom in dense waves of color. Monet planned the planting like a composition, mixing heights and tones so that the borders read almost like brushstrokes. A few steps away, reached by a small passage, lies the water garden, the Japanese-inspired landscape he created by diverting a branch of the river. Here are the green bridge, the weeping willows, the wisteria and the pond covered in water lilies, the very scene that filled the great canvases of his final decades. Crossing from one garden to the other, you move from vivid, structured color into something softer and more reflective, and you understand how a single place could feed a lifetime of painting.
