The Garden Path at Giverny

Claude Monet painted this view of the main path through his own flower garden at Giverny in 1902, signing and dating it Claude Monet 02 at lower right. The nearly square canvas, 89.5 by 92.3 centimeters, belongs to the Belvedere in Vienna (inventory 3889), which calls it Path in Monet's Garden in Giverny; in French it is Une Allée du jardin de Monet, Giverny, and it is catalogued by Daniel Wildenstein as W 1650. It shows the Grande Allée, the spine of the garden Monet planted himself from 1883 onward.

What you are looking at

The path runs straight up the middle of the picture from the bottom edge toward the house, which appears at the far end only as a few blocks of pink and red around a short flight of steps. On either side, deep borders of flowers press in: great banks of violet and purple in the foreground, probably asters, then red, orange and white blooms behind them. Overhead, the iron arches that carried Monet's climbing roses have vanished under foliage, and the top third of the canvas is a canopy of rust, olive, green and red that closes over the path like a tunnel.

The real subject is the light on the gravel. Sun falls through the canopy in bars, so the path is striped with alternating bands of warm apricot and cool blue-violet shadow. The stripes do the work of perspective. Near us they are broad and widely spaced; toward the house they narrow and crowd together, until the path becomes a single bright strip at the steps.

Look at the color pairs. The violet of the asters sits directly against the orange of the sunlit path, and the red flowers against green leaves: complementary colors placed side by side, so each makes the other brighter. At the left edge, a few slim pinkish trunks rise into the canopy, the only vertical lines in a picture otherwise made of dabs.

How it was painted

By 1902 Monet's touch had become dense and woven. The borders are built up in short, overlapping strokes with little bare canvas left between them. Color is laid side by side rather than mixed on the palette, and there is almost no linear drawing anywhere: even the house is reduced to a few strokes of pink, red and blue-green. The canopy is painted in long, downward-hanging strokes that suggest trailing stems, very different from the round dabs of the flower beds.

The square format and the symmetrical, centered path are unusual for Monet. They give the picture a frontal, almost decorative quality, and look forward to the square and near-square water-lily canvases he would paint in the following years.

The Grande Allée and the Clos Normand

When Monet rented the house at Giverny in 1883, a central alley lined with spruces and cypresses ran from the front door to the road. He cut the trees down, kept two yews near the house and turned the alley into a flower walk, later adding the iron arches for roses. This flower garden, the Clos Normand, was his first project at Giverny; the water garden across the road, with its pond and Japanese bridge, came after 1893.

By 1902 the gardens were mature, and Monet was painting both. The flower garden appears in other canvases of these years, such as Irises in Monet's Garden at Giverny of 1900, while the water garden produced The Japanese Footbridge and Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies. In late summer, nasturtiums were allowed to creep across the Grande Allée from both sides, and the path here is already narrowed by borders spilling onto the gravel.

Monet had painted gardens wherever he lived: the family garden at Sainte-Adresse in 1867 and his rented gardens at Argenteuil, as in The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil. At Giverny, for the first time, Monet designed the garden and painted it, making the motif before he made the picture. More on the house and both gardens is on our Giverny hub.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna, one of the few major Monets in Austria. The garden itself was restored in the 1970s and 1980s and is open to visitors at Giverny for much of the year. For Monets in other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.