Monet first discovered Giverny, located on the border between the province of Normandy and Ile-de-France, while leaning out the window of a train. In 1890, after saving up enough money, Monet purchased a house and surrounding plot of land that would become not only his home until his death in 1926 but also the subject of many of his most exquisite paintings.

In tune with his fascination with Japanese art and culture, Monet created a water garden and arched bridge over the pond on his property to mimic those he had studied in pictures and painted scrolls. In 1899, Monet began a series of eighteen views of the wooden footbridge under varying light conditions just as he had previously done with poplar trees, haystacks, and the Rouen Cathedral.

Monet’s attention to the color of light was novel on many levels. While not as concerned with optics and the science of vision as his Neo-Impressionist successors Seurat and Signac proved to be, Monet’s adept experimentation and capturing of the way in which our perception of color changes as the day progresses had a profound and lasting effect on the history of art. Monet’s original manner of applying paint to canvas in short, multi-colored brushstrokes anticipates later artists’ more pure abstraction of their various subjects.

This picture is particularly exciting in that it is at once technically brilliant and historically important in that it offers viewers insight into the artist’s self-engineered idyllic world. It is important to note that the artist’s departure from Paris and embrace of Giverny took place during a time of intense political tumult and cultural upheaval in France and most specifically in Paris.

More than providing the artist with incredible fodder for creative experimentation, Giverny served as refuge from the rise of industrialization and all of the problems that came with it as well as the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution and dissolution of the Paris Commune. There is in this way more to Monet’s depictions of the footbridge at Giverny than at first meets the eye.