Easels in Eden: Monet’s Gardening and Painting at Giverny

The relationship between Claude Monet’s gardening practices and painterly techniques as he used them to create over 500 canvasses in the landscape at Giverny from the 1890s until his death in 1926 is the focus of this lecture.  Central to our concerns is an examination of how Monet moved beyond representation to abstraction and thus prefigured the Modern aesthetic in the most subtle of terms.

Eric Haskell is a professor in French studies at the Scripps College, Claremont University, California, where he is also director of the Clark Humanities Museum. He also studied history of art and architecture within the context of the higher education programme offered by the UCI and the École du Louvre in Paris. Dr Haskell’s lectures focus on the study of the political and social traditions that have shaped France. He has published around thirty works in English and French on a range of subjects, ranging from 19th century poetry to the history of gardens. In the specific field of the history of gardens and the aesthetics of landscape, Dr Haskell has organised over a dozen exhibitions.

Further reading :
– Claude Monet à Giverny : un maître en son jardin, Dominique Lobstein, La Martinière, 2013
– Giverny : le jardin de Claude Monet, Brigitte et Philippe Perdereau, Ulmer, 2009
– Monet à Giverny, Adrien Goetz, Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2015
– Le Notre’s Gardens, Eric Haskell, RAM Publications, 1999
– Les Jardins de Brécy: Le Paradis Retrouvé, Eric Haskell, Editions du Huitième Jour, 2007