Queuing for waterlilies

A blog post Gill read mentioned that you could park-up overnight at the Monet Foundation in Giverny; it also said that being there first thing meant you could beat the queues. We should have taken note, for when we arrived mid-morning the queue for tickets was 200 metres long, and not moving an inch. After standing on the same spot for about ten minutes, a German women in front of us said to us that she'd heard that buying a joint ticket for both Monet's garden, and the nearby Museum of Impressionism meant you could skip the queue for the garden. This sounded like a  better plan, so off we trotted to the museum; there was no queue for tickets, and it was true, this did allow you straight into the gardens.

The museum was hosting an excellent temporary Degas exhibition. It covered his earliest work as a student in typical academic style, through his Impressionist period, ending with some large pastels from the 1890's whose irridescent colours reminded me of symbolist artists, like Redon and Moreau. Though the exhibition was small, it did contain some of the artist's stellar works, including his pictures of dancers backstage at the Opera, small nude figurines of dancers, as well as a replica of his famous 'little ballerina' sculpture.

All this would have been great had the museum not been packed, which meant you glimpsed most of the paintings through a crowd, many of whom were American tourists escaped from Seine river cruises, keen to show off their cultural credentials by standing in front of paintings at random and declaring them 'adorable'. 

At least the scrum at the museum prepared you for the mass trespass In the garden. There was literally a crocodile line of tourists wending their way around the lily ponds and through the flower gardens. The place is lovely, a mixture of wisteria and clematis draped walkways, cool reflective pools, and a profusion of colour in the herbaceous beds nearer the house.

Gill took some great shots of the garden, which does justice to Monet's original vision:

Being more misanthropic, I could not get over how crowded the place was, and ignored the flowers and started to take pictures of the milling tourists:

I assume the curators must have reinforced Monet's famous 'Japanese bridge' with steel girders to cope with the weight of portly tourists. Through perseverance I did manage to take one picture of Gill that did not include random body parts belonging to fellow visitors.

In truth, the flowers were lovely, and even though the entire place is actually a replica constructed in the 1980s, after the original house and garden fell into a ruinous state following Monet's death in 1926, somehow, despite rampant commodification, mass tourism and  kitch merchandising, something of the magic of Monet's unique vision still shone through. I can't remember which of his contemporaries commented, "Monet is just an eye, but my God, what an eye!"