2 Best Sights in Giverny, Side Trips from Paris

After several years living north of Paris, Monet moved downriver to Giverny in 1883. With its pretty pink walls and green shutters, his house has a warm feeling that’s a welcome change after the stateliness of the French châteaux. Rooms have been restored to Monet's original designs: the kitchen with its blue tiles, the buttercup-yellow dining room, and Monet's bedroom on the second floor. Reproductions of the painter's works, and some of the Japanese prints he avidly collected, crowd its walls. The garden à la japonaise, with flowers spilling out across the paths, contains the famous "tea-garden" bridge and water-lily pond. Looking across the pond, it's easy to conjure up the grizzled, bearded painter dabbing at his canvases—capturing changes in light and pioneering a breakdown in form that was to have a major influence on 20th-century art.

The garden—planted with nearly 100,000 annuals and even more perennials—is a place of wonder. No matter that about 500,000 visitors troop through each year; they seem to fade in the presence of beautiful roses, carnations, lady's slipper, tulips, irises, hollyhocks, poppies, daisies, nasturtiums, larkspur, azaleas, and more. With that said, it still helps to visit midweek when crowds are thinner. If you want to pay your respects to the original gardener, Monet is buried in the family vault in Giverny's village church. Although the gardens overall are most beautiful in spring, the water lilies bloom during the latter part of July and the first two weeks of August.

After touring the painterly grounds of Monet's house, you may wish to see some real paintings at the Musée des Impressionnismes. Originally endowed by the late Chicago art patrons Daniel and Judith Terra, it featured a few works by the American Impressionists, including Willard Metcalf, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel, and John Leslie Breck, who flocked to Giverny to study at the hand of the master. But in recent years the museum has extended its scope with an exciting array of exhibitions that explore the origins, geographical diversity, and wide-ranging influences of Impressionism—in the process highlighting the importance of Giverny and the Seine Valley in the history of the movement. There's an on-site restaurant and salon de thé (tearoom) with a fine outdoor terrace, as well as a garden "quoting" some of Monet's plant compositions. Farther down the road, you can visit Giverny's landmark Hôtel Baudy, a restaurant that was once the preferred watering hole of many 19th-century artists.