France: Normandy & Paris

Toured Monet's home and gardens in Giverny, where he lived since 1883, approximately 1:20 from Paris. Monet was influenced by Japanese art and especially water-lilly ponds, which he created next to his home near the Seine in Giverny.

Monet's ambition to document the French countryside led to a method of painting the same scene many times so as to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. Among the best-known examples are his series of haystacks (1890–91), paintings of the Rouen Cathedral (1894), and the paintings of water lilies in his garden in Giverny that occupied him continuously for the last 20 years of his life.

To keep with the awful Nazi theme, Jewish art collectors of Monet were looted by Nazis and their agents. Several of the stolen artworks have been restituted to their former owners, while others have been the object of court battles. In 2014, during the spectacular discovery of a hidden trove of art in Munich, a Monet that had belonged to a Jewish retail magnate was found in the suitcase of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers of looted art, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

A painting from his water-lilly series sold for over $80M in 2008.

He died in 1926 @ 86, very wealthy and the most famous painters
of his time.Weiterlesen