The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil - A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias, Claude Monet from the old master collection

The Artist's Garden in Argenteuil - A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias, Claude Monet (1873)

Also known as: Monet's garden.

Monet's paintings of his water-garden and water-lilies at Giverny occupied him for many years in the latter part of his life and were his last great work. Like the works of Turner in the final stage, they were for a long time misunderstood and unappreciated but similarly revived in esteem in the light of modern reappraisal. By the end of 1890 Monet was making enough from the sales of his pictures to buy his house at Giverny outright and soon after began improvements to the garden which included the formation of a pond from a marshy tract by damming a stream that ran into the river Epte.

A bank of flowering bushes, possibly roses, fills most of an enclosed garden in front of a white house in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is created using visible dabs and strokes of scarlet red, pale yellow, rust orange, and shell pink for the roses and kelly, teal, and forest green for the greenery. The cloud of flowers fills most of the left two-thirds of the composition, and dabs of shamrock and moss green and delphinium blue indicate grass and other plants around it.