10 Fun Facts About Monet That Will Make Your Trip to Giverny Even Better

If you’ve ever been to Giverny and walked across the little green Japanese bridge and looked down at the water lilies, you’ll understand why Claude Monet spent more than 40 years in this exact spot, painting the same pond over and over until his eyes gave up on him.

2026 marks 100 years since Monet died at Giverny on December 5, 1926, aged 86. Normandy and the Paris region are hosting over 100 events to mark the occasion.

So, I thought it was a good moment to dig into the man himself, because the more I read about Monet, the odder he gets. He loved to drive fast cars, eat tripe sausage for breakfast, and take a knife to his own paintings. He once drove 125 miles for a slice of apple tart. So let’s see how many of these fun facts you know and how many you’re hearing about for the first time.

1. He Accidentally Named an Entire Art Movement at 32

In 1874, Monet hung a painting in the first group show of a scrappy collective of young painters in Paris. It was called Impression, soleil levant, a hazy, smudgy sunrise over the port of Le Havre where he’d grown up. The cranes and chimneys are barely there. The sun is a smear of orange. It looks, to modern eyes, like the most obvious masterpiece in the room.

That wasn’t how the critics saw it at the time. One of them, a man called Louis Leroy writing for the satirical paper Le Charivari, used the title to mock the whole show, sneering that if this was an impression, the painters could barely be bothered to finish their work. He called them Impressionists, meant it as an insult, and the name stuck. Monet was 32 years old and had just christened a movement without trying to.

2. He Owed Everything to a Beach Painter from Honfleur

Before Monet was Monet, he was a teenager in Le Havre making decent money drawing caricatures of local people. Then he met Eugène Boudin, a painter from across the Seine estuary in Honfleur, known for his big skies and quiet beach scenes full of women in crinolines holding parasols.

Boudin took one look at Monet’s caricatures and told him to come outside. Paint what you can see, he said. Paint the sky, paint the sand, paint the way the light changes in 20 minutes. This idea, painting en plein air rather than in a studio from sketches, was the seed of everything Monet went on to do. 

He later said he owed Boudin everything, which is a generous thing to admit about another artist when you’re as famous as Monet became.

Honfleur is stunning, and sadly, the houses around the harbor are starting to collapse, and some of them are now roped off, but it’s still beautiful and worth a visit if you’re driving the Normandy coast. The little harbor Boudin painted is still there, the light off the water hasn’t changed, and the Eugène Boudin Museum has a proper room dedicated to him. It’s a useful primer before you head inland to Giverny.

3. He Painted Trains and Smokestacks as Often as Flowers

There’s a tendency to file Monet under garden painter, as if he spent his whole life drifting around lily ponds in a straw hat. He didn’t. He was as captivated by industrial Paris as he was by the countryside, and some of his best work is set under glass roofs and inside clouds of locomotive steam.

His Gare Saint-Lazare series, painted in 1877, is a dozen canvases of the Paris train station where he used to catch the line out to Normandy. The smoke is so thick you can almost cough on it. The light comes through the glass in shafts. He set up his easel right on the platform, and the station master, somehow charmed into cooperation, held trains for him so the steam would build up properly. I’d love to know what the commuters thought.

He did the same thing in London, painting the Houses of Parliament and the Thames through the city’s famous yellow fogs. For Monet, the subject was always light. A factory chimney suited him just as well as a poplar tree, as long as the sun was doing something interesting behind it.

4. Giverny Wasn’t the Only Monet House on the Seine

When Monet was young and broke, which was most of the 1860s and 1870s, he moved house constantly. Sometimes to be near other painters, often to dodge creditors. As his career picked up, he edged his way west out of Paris along the Seine, settling first at Argenteuil from 1874 to 1878, then at Vétheuil from 1878 to 1881, and finally at Giverny from 1883 until his death.

Giverny is the famous one, and rightly so. It’s the second-most-visited spot in all of Normandy; the gardens are immaculate, and the house is full of his Japanese prints in their original positions. But the other two houses are open to visitors as well, and they’re far quieter. 

If you’ve already done Giverny on a previous trip and want something less crowded, both Argenteuil and Vétheuil are within reach of Paris and offer a sense of where his eye was developing before the lily pond took over his life.

Vétheuil is especially poignant. It’s where his first wife Camille died, and where some of his most garden paintings were made before he had the budget for seven gardeners and a Japanese bridge.

5. He Married Twice

Monet’s first wife was Camille Doncieux, his favorite model, who appears in around 50 of his paintings. She’s the woman with the green parasol, the woman in the field of poppies, the woman in the white dress. They married in 1870, had two sons, Jean and Michel, and Camille died at Vétheuil in 1879 at just 32. 

Monet painted her on her deathbed, then was reportedly horrified at himself for noticing the colors of her dying skin even in his grief.

His second wife, Alice Hoschedé, came into his life through her first husband, Ernest, a department store owner and art collector who had commissioned work from Monet, including, of all things, Impression, soleil levant. Ernest went bankrupt, the two families ended up sharing a house, and after Ernest died, Alice and Claude married in 1892. She brought six children, he brought his two, and they all moved to Giverny together.

If that wasn’t tangled enough, Alice’s daughter Blanche became Monet’s painting pupil and married his son Jean, who was technically her stepbrother.

6. The Garden Was a Painting Before It Was a Garden

By the time Monet arrived at Giverny in 1883, he was already a serious gardener. His paintings of the Vétheuil garden, full of sunflowers, gravel paths, and small children running between the beds, show a man who knew what he was doing with a trowel.

At Giverny, he went much further. He bought adjacent land, dammed a stream to create the famous water lily pond, imported the Japanese bridge, and ordered plants by mail from nurseries across France and beyond. 

He employed seven full-time gardeners, and wrote them daily notes about what to plant where, what to deadhead, and what colors he wanted blooming in which month. The blue irises had to line up with the yellow ones, and the wisteria had to drip just so over the bridge.

The whole place was set up as a living palette. Visiting Giverny is as if you’re walking inside the picture.

7. He Ate Tripe Sausage for Breakfast and Drove 125 Miles for an Apple Tart

Monet was a serious eater, and mealtimes at Giverny were a serious affair. Breakfast was at 6 am, and it could include andouillette, the tripe sausage that even most French people approach with caution, washed down with white wine. 

The yellow dining room, painted a buttery yellow he chose himself, is still set up the way he left it, and you can see exactly where the household was meant to sit at his very specific hour.

He also loved cars, which had only just been invented in any practical sense, and was an early enthusiastic owner. He drove fast and for the fun of it. There’s a much-repeated story that he once drove 125 miles south to Lamotte-Beuvron just to eat the upside-down apple tart made by the Tatin sisters, the dessert we now know as tarte Tatin. 

Whether that was a single trip or a habit isn’t entirely clear, but it tells you something about how he lived.

And then there was the Japanese print collection. He bought obsessively, hung them all over the house at Giverny, and let their flat blocks of color and bold compositions seep into his own work. They’re still on the walls today, exactly where he placed them. If you go, slow down inside the house before you head out to the pond. Half the story is indoors.

8. He Painted the Same View Until It Broke Him

From around 1890 onwards, Monet stopped looking for new subjects and started painting the same things over and over under different light. Haystacks in a field near Giverny: 25 of them. Poplars along a riverbank: 24 or so. 

The facade of Rouen Cathedral: more than 30 versions, painted from an upstairs room across the square that is now part of the Rouen tourist office.

He’d set up multiple canvases at once, working on one for 20 minutes while the light was a certain way, then switching to another as the sun moved. He chased the weather, the fog, and waited for specific clouds. His letters from this period are full of complaints about the sun coming out when he wanted overcast, or the leaves changing before he’d finished the autumn version.

This is also the period where Monet really pulled away from anything resembling realism. The cathedral series, in particular, is closer to abstraction than to a building. The stone simply dissolves. The whole thing becomes color and light and the time of day. 

He was 50 years ahead of the painters who would later get credit for inventing abstraction, and he did so by staring at one church for three years.

9. He Destroyed Around 500 of His Own Paintings

Monet was, by every account, his own worst critic. His wife Alice wrote to a friend in 1908 that he was punching holes in canvases every day. The same year, an exhibition of his water lilies in Paris had to be postponed because he took a knife to at least 15 of the paintings meant to hang in it. 

The total number he destroyed over his lifetime is thought to be around 500, which is a staggering figure when you consider the prices his surviving work fetches now.

He once wrote that his life had been nothing but a failure and that all he had left to do was destroy his paintings before he disappeared. This from a man who, by then, was internationally famous, wealthy enough to employ a small army of gardeners, and hosting curators and politicians at his lunch table.

Part of it was eyesight. He developed cataracts in his later years, which dramatically shifted how he saw color. The work from this period leans heavily into reds and yellows because that’s what he could still perceive clearly; the blues had gone muddy on him. 

He had surgery on one eye in 1923 and complained about the results for the rest of his life. Some of his most divisive late works were made when he could barely see what he was doing, which makes the achievement of the Orangerie panels even more remarkable.

10. The Orangerie Water Lilies Were His Last Gift to France

If you only do one Monet thing in Paris, make it the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries. The water lily panels there were Monet’s own idea, which he offered to the French nation the day after the Armistice was signed in November 1918. 

He wrote to his old friend Georges Clemenceau, the wartime Prime Minister, and proposed two enormous canvases as a gift, a kind of peace offering from the painter to the exhausted country.

What ended up installed is eight panels across two oval rooms, designed by Monet to wrap the viewer inside the pond. 

He specified the exact dimensions of the rooms, the curve of the walls, the natural overhead light, and the height at which the canvases would hang. You stand in the middle, and the water surrounds you. There’s no frame, no horizon, no edge. It’s the closest thing painting has ever come to making you stop being a viewer and start being a participant.

He worked on these panels in the last years of his life, half-blind, frustrated, ripping things up and starting again. He died in December 1926, a few months before the Orangerie opened to the public in 1927. 

By then, Impressionism had gone out of fashion, the panels were politely received and largely ignored, and it took the end of another war before the public came back round to him.

Now there’s a queue out the door most days. If you go, get there when it opens, sit on one of the long benches in the middle of the second room, and don’t look at your phone for 10 minutes. The light moves through the skylight just enough during that time to change the painting in front of you, exactly the way Monet planned it 100 years ago.