Remembering Painter and Gardener Claude Monet: His Funeral, His Friend, and His Love of Nature

December 5, 1926

On this day, the impressionist painter Claude Monet died at 86.

Claude had insisted on a simple funeral, and as such, his coffin was draped with plain black cloth.

But his dear old friend Georges Clemenceau ("kle-mon-so") removed it, stating,

No! No black for Monet!

Georges replaced the black cloth with a flower-patterned table cloth.

Gardeners love Stephen Gwynn's 1934 book Claude Monet and His Garden.

In 1883, Claude purchased a property, and he immediately set about creating a hidden water garden fashioned out of waste marshland.

Claude ensured his lily pond was surrounded by trees and plants, incorporating poplars, willows, bamboo, and iris.

Claude's favorite plant and painting subject were, no doubt, his water lilies.

Claude said,

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude painted his garden for over 40 years.

In 1914, Claude began his most impressive work - a series of large panels that offered a 360-degree view of the pond. Claude worked on the panels all through the First World War. 

It was Claude who wrote:

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever.

Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.

And it was Claude who said,

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.

and

I must have flowers, always, and always.