Through Monet's Garden, a Collaboration Blossoms

«It's springtime in New York, and to celebrate we've collaborated with the New York Botanical Garden on a free app that invites you to experience Claude Monet's living masterpiece, his garden at Giverny.» The release of NYBG in Bloom/Monet's Garden coincides with the NYBG's special exhibition Monet’s Garden(on view May 19–October 21). Complementing the botanical installations at the Garden, the app includes a section called "Paintings and Plants" that features images of Monet paintings on view at the Met, with links to our Collections for more information.

Wherever Monet lived—Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Giverny—he planted gardens that held the promise of fresh motifs every spring. During the last two decades of his life, he dedicated himself almost single mindedly to depicting the water garden he had cultivated at Giverny, as he said, "for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint."

Met curator Susan Alyson Stein describes the importance of this theme for Monet:

Perhaps no other artist was more attentive to the changing face of nature as it unfolded from morning to night, and from day to day, and from season to season than Claude Monet. He long insisted that nature was his studio and once remarked, "I perhaps owe it to flowers for having become a painter."

Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926). Water Lilies, 1919. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1998, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002 (1998.325.2)

During the exhibition at the Garden, the paintings featured in the app—including Water Lilies, shown above, will be on view in Gallery 819 and Gallery 822 within the European Paintings galleries. Rain or shine, in the Museum or en plein air, this collaboration with the Garden is—quite literally—a natural.