Pâques aux jardins de Claude Monet

This was the first year since Liv was born that we didn’t spend Easter Sunday with our dear friends Stephen & Leslie at their annual Easter Party. We tried to FaceTime with them but the connection was terrible. We spent Easter Sunday driving through Normandie to Giverny, France to visit the Claude Monet gardens. To be honest, I am not the biggest Monet fan. I know of his work but it’s not for me. Here’s what Wikipedia says about him.

Oscar-Claude Monet
14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926 was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874. Monet’s ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.

Well, the town of Giverny was beautiful! To bad the weather was nice enough to bring out the bus-loads of tourists. We arrived later in the day and it was still crowded. Luckily, we have mastered the skill of cropping out the masses and finding empty spots.

After a long day of trying to get the perfect shot, I was thrilled to capture this candid moment of Liv and Antz discussing something silly. I wish I could get more candids of the three of us together enjoying the day without the contrived posing. I need to keep that in mind for our future photos.