Americans in Giverny

The title of this post does not refer to a small family from Pennsylvania, nor even to Laura Bush and her secret service detail, but to a group of American artists who formed a small artists' colony there in around 1887, several years after Monet had settled in the area. Today, there is a museum dedicated to the works of these artists and other Americans who influenced and were influenced by the Paris art scene. This great little museum is just down the street from Monet's house. As seen here from the side, the museum is very well-integrated with its surroundings and is surrounded by some very nice gardens. It's definitely modern, but has been designed to echo themes from Monet's gardens and paintings in interesting ways.

We started our afternoon there with lunch at the museum cafe's shaded patio, then went through the very manageable, spacious exhibits, and hung out in the gardens for the rest of the afternoon -- a good portion of it with a 3-year-old from Paris and her parents whom we met while resting on a bench in the shade.

Overall, we found the Museum of American Art to be a better fit for us than Monet's house and gardens. Of course it lacks the history of Monet's digs, but it also lacks the crowd-control problems. (Imagine! for some reason Monet does not seem to have foreseen that his house would become such a tourist destination, as he made almost no preparations to accommodate them.) Here, Molly and Betsy are enjoying the meadow of poppies behind the museum.

One thing the Museum of American Art has done really well is to provide a booklet of kids' activities. In this picture, for instance, Molly and another small person and a slightly out-of-focus Betsy are trying to find the seven differences between the painting they're sitting in front of and the slightly altered reproduction in their booklet. Another activity presents a set of nine putative closeups of a painting of the Luxembourg Garden by Charles Courtney Curran and asks young detectives to discover the one which is not actually part of the real painting.

In yet another activity, the kids were presented several palettes of paints and told to find which of several possible paintings matched each palette. Betsy really enjoyed this activity, and even found and transcribed the titles of two of the three paintings. So it was with a sense of great appreciation for the quality of these works and their presentation that we noticed that Laura Bush, in the picture by Thibault Camus on another blog post, is closely examining the first and last pictures shown here. Not many things, we think, could interest both six-year-olds and wives of heads of state.