Issue 41 Spring web - Flipbook - Page 4
Garden Museum
Jean-Marie Toulgouat: Gardening Giverny - 13 March - 24 April 2024
This spring the Garden Museum will present paintings of
Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny by Jean-Marie Toulgouat, Monet’s great-grandson (by marriage). Gardening
Giverny will celebrate Toulgouat’s distinctive oeuvre of
paintings capturing his personal relationship with the land.
Initially resisting painting, Toulgouat left Giverny in
1947 to train as an architect. For sixteen years, he
practiced as a landscape architect in Paris, where he
designed municipal parks and gardens. In the 1960s,
accompanied by his wife the late art historian and writer
Claire Joyes, he returned to Giverny. There, he embraced
the life of a painter and embarked on assisting an ambitious project to safeguard the integrity of Monet’s last
home and to restore Giverny to its former brilliance.
Alongside Toulgouat’s paintings, the exhibition will
feature archival photographs of the gardens at the time
by legendary garden photographer Andrew Lawson, and
immersive elements bringing Giverny to life in London.
Gardening Giverny will trace the development of the famous gardens under Monet, the building of the water garden, and its later restoration under Toulgouat's guidance.
The task of planning and reconstructing the longneglected gardens and studio was immense. Possessing
an intimate knowledge of Monet’s home, Toulgouat’s
recollections of growing up at Giverny in the 1930s were
invaluable for their restoration. It is because of him that
the walls in Monet’s studios were ‘returned to their true
colours’, and the planting and borders in the garden were
restored to Monet’s original design.
Born in Giverny, Normandy in 1928, Jean-Marie
Toulgouat grew up surrounded by Impressionist masterpieces and beautiful gardens. In Monet’s old house and
studio the young Toulgouat, who was also the grandson
of American painter Theodore Butler, played alongside
Monet’s own remarkable art collection featuring works by
Pissarro, Manet, Cezanne, and Renoir.
The works in this exhibition are available for purchase in
aid of the Garden Museum’s educational and community
programmes.
Toulgouat created his own distinctive oeuvre of vibrantly
coloured oil paintings of the gardens at Giverny, capturing
his personal relationship with the land. The paintings in
this exhibition, produced in the last decades of his life,
possess the spirit of impressionism, but are more modern
in their idiom than Monet’s: a subtle mix of bold and pastel colours in a restricted but carefully selected palette,
whether painting in oils, gouache or watercolour.
The exhibition is held in conjunction with an exhibition
of newly discovered works by Jean-Marie Toulgouat,
running 6 March till April 2024 at David Messum Fine
Art, who represent the Estate of Jean-Marie Toulgouat /
the Artist’s Estate.
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Conservation & Heritage Journal
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