Show Me the Monet

There are a lot of good builds in OpenSim, but some are beyond good - for the attention to rl details, for the exceptional building skills, for the atmosphere created on the sim. 

French creator Erwan Elan has a lot of lovely regions on his Serenity Grid, but perhaps the best of all of them is his bravura re-creation of Giverny, in Normandy, the famous home of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. 

Inside and out, this is hands down the best Monet inspired build you are likely to ever see. Erwan's feel for his subject matter, his thorough research and dedication, radiate out of every texture, and his clever use of the excellent plant resources in opensim (Jimmy Olsen and Imperator Janus spring to mind) thoroughly meet the task he sets for them.

If you have spent any time at all at Giverny in the real world, you'll probably have a story to tell about long queues, an international crowd shuffling dully through the carefully organized garden trail, or about how you went there on a cloudy day, or when the flowers were not looking their best. That is a pretty common experience that you can totally avoid by going to this virtual version of the old farmhouse and two acre garden laid out by Monet and his family in the late 1800's. It is on Serenity Grid, the address is, as always, at the end of the post.

Monet's life, like his paintings, has reached legendary heights, with biographical episodes as vivid and colorful as artwork. Like that time he was so intent on painting a Normandy seascape that a gust of wind caught his palette and covered his beard and smock with paint. Or the time when he was in the Netherlands, buying spices, and they wrapped his purchases in paper covered with Japanese woodcut prints, leading to a life-long fascination with Japanese art. Or the hundreds of times he painted the same thing, quite often destroying paintings when mad or a bit depressed. Only two of those three facts are actually true, 

Claude Monet lived almost exactly half his life in Giverny. He was 42 when he moved there, glad to leave the less-than-stellar environs of the workaday riverside Paris suburb of Argenteuil for a place that offered more space and more peace for his his complicated family life. He resided in the small country house with its modest hectare until his death at age 86, in 1926. 

It was a rental to begin with. For the eight years of his tenancy Monet modded the place, creating a studio space for painting and fixing up the garden to his liking, so it was a no brainer to go ahead and buy when the owners put it up for sale. The neighbors weren't keen, but his international colleagues, admirers and clients flocked to him. Monet didn't exactly have the money to buy the place, but savvy art admirers helped him out and before his 50th birthday he was the proud owner of one of the most iconic gardens in France.

What 'is' the garden at Giverny? It can be a disappointment to anyone expecting some sort of Chelsea Flower Show exhibit, with herbaceous borders or parterres or cute cottage-garden style flowerbeds. 

This is not Kew or Versailles or Sissinghurst. Much of the main garden is laid out in great blocks of riotous color, with masses of tulips, peonies, pansies, dahlias, zinnias, roses according to the season. Monet's vision transcends greetings card art and looks into the infinite powerplay between light and pigment.

Well OK, and a bit of chocolate box art too. Where is the harm in that.

Inworld when you arrive on the region on Serenity Grid, you'll find yourself in an interpretive center. Erwan has done a great job in making this area spartan and informative, it allows you and your viewer to rez contemporaneously, absorbing the sense of time and place, and adopting that guinguette mentality. without the crowds god bless him 

But more than that. While most people think of the flower garden, the bamboo forest and the lily pond, and of course the Japanese bridge as the essential Giverny, Erwan has also dedicated a lot of time to the interior of the house. Take the yellow salle a manger for example... 

...just in case you doubt the historical accuracy, take a gander at the photo in one corner...

Japanese art formed an immense part of Monet's personal art collection, and that hasn't been neglected in this reconstruction (with photographic contextualization) throughout the house. It deserves a visit all to itself, in order to take in the wealth of  history and culture on display here. It's a unique opportunity to imagine what life must have been like for Monet and the awful Alice and their various children living in Giverny in the 40 years from 1860 to the 1920s.

During World War I, with the sounds of guns audible from his beloved Giverny garden, Monet painted eight huge canvases of water lilies, a sort of tribute to the lives lost in the battlefields. He was, at this point, in his 70s and had problems with his eyesight. Canvasses almost two meters high and adding up to a length of  100 meters, this series of paintings adorn an oval room in the Orangerie close to the Louvre Museum, a gift to the nation made on Armistice Day, a gesture of hope and serenity made by the painter who had lived through so many changes and upheavals in the real world.

An inspiration for us all.

Thanks so much to dear Erwan Elan for allowing this special visit to the Monet House and garden, on his Serenity Grid. 

HG Address: serenitygrid.com:8010:SERENITY-Monet-House