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Giverny

In 1883, Monet and his family rented a house and gardens in Giverny, which provided him domestic stability he had not yet enjoyed. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend, and the surrounding landscape provided numerous natural areas for Monet to paint.

The family worked and built up the gardens, and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings. The gardens were Monet's greatest source of inspiration for 40 years. In 1890, Monet purchased the house. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building well lit with skylights.

Monet wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. As Monet's wealth grew, his garden evolved. He remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners. Monet purchased additional land with a water meadow. White water lilies local to France were planted along with imported cultivars from South America and Egypt, resulting in a range of colours including yellow, blue and white lilies that turned pink with age. In 1902, he increased the size of his water garden by nearly 4000 square metres; the pond was enlarged in 1901 and 1910 with easels installed all around to allow different perspectives to be captured.

Dissatisfied with the limitations of Impressionism, Monet began to work on series of paintings displaying single subjects—haystacks, poplars and the Rouen Cathedral —to resolve his frustration. These series of paintings provided widespread critical and financial success; in 1898, 61 paintings were exhibited at the Petit gallery. He also began a series of Mornings on the Seine, which portrayed the dawn hours of the river. In 1887 and 1889 he displayed a series of paintings of Belle Île to rave reviews by critics. Monet chose the location in the hope of finding a "new aesthetic language that bypassed learned formulas, one that would be both true to nature and unique to him as an individual, not like anyone else."

In 1899, he began painting the water lilies that would occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life, being his last and "most ambitious" sequence of paintings. He had exhibited this first group of pictures of the garden, devoted primarily to his Japanese bridge, in 1900. He returned to London—now residing at the prestigious Savoy Hotel —in 1899 to produce a series that included 41 paintings of Waterloo bridge, 34 of Charing Cross bridge and 19 of the House of Parliament. Monet's final journey would be to Venice, with Alice in 1908.

Depictions of the water lilies, with alternating light and mirror-like reflections, became an integral part of his work. By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved "a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art". Claude Roger-Marx noted in a review of Monet's successful 1909 exhibition of the first Water Lilies series that he had "reached the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination joined to the real". This exhibition, entitled Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscape, consisted of 42 canvases, his "largest and most unified series to date". He would ultimately make over 250 paintings of the Waterlilies.

At his house, Monet met with artists, writers, intellectuals and politicians from France, England, Japan and the United States. In the summer of 1887 he met John Singer Sargent whose experimentation with figure painting out of doors intrigued him; the pair went on to frequently influence each other.