In cultivating his garden at Giverny in Normandy (famous for the water lilies series of paintings) from the mid 1880s, he felt he had created “his most beautiful work of art”.

Monet’s love for gardening began much earlier in the 1860s and was shared by his artist friends and fellow Impressionists, Frédéric Bazille, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and, in particular, Gustave Caillebotte.

For the Impressionists, gardens with new and unusual varieties of flowers and shrubs provided the artists with exciting juxtapositions of colour combined with the variations of outdoor light effects. The paintings often give us an intimate view of how their private and working lives interacted.