two super blogs on Monet/Giverny

These are two evocative blogs on Monet and his enormous Giverny gardens (in whose original creation he hired many gardeners and conscripted his often grumpy kids and stepkids).

Monet, Giverny, and Normandy
http://www.monet-giverny-normandy.com/

and Giverny News
http://givernews.com/
written poetically by a Giverny Guide. I read this almost every day in my struggling French when writing my novel Claude & Camille: a novel of Claude Monet (Crown, April 6th). Amazon.com link: http://tinyurl.com/ykhkuho

The photograph is of Monet's grave in Giverny which I found while there and stood for some minutes in awe before the mortal remains of the great and generous painter.

Christmas among the impressionists...

...is a hard subject to research, and I am afraid I have come up with very little but that Edouard Manet once gave Berthe Morisot an easel for Christmas. I would most kindly appreciate any more information from my readers. Though Claude Monet was not religious in any way (but for nature), his second wife Alice was a devout Catholic and surely walked down the cold road a short way from Giverny to the church for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

A happy holiday to the many readers of this blog!

The painting is of course Monet's famous MAGPIE IN THE SNOW.

Claude Monet's starving artist years

Everybody knows the picture of the old white-bearded man, well fed, showing visitors his Japanese bridge and water lilies, his vast studio and his plentiful table. But the young Claude personifies the starving artist. For months at a time, he and his good friend Renoir lived on a large sack of beans and made quick chalk sketches of the neighbors to pay the rent. More than once the young Claude was physically thrown out of his cheap rooms, once slashing his canvases before he ran out the door (to think of it!) and another time tossed out stark naked in the middle of the night. It was a long road to Giverny!

Here's our Claude age 25 -- wondering if anyone would ever want his work or if he could afford a flower pot, much less a garden!