Submitted by Deborah Shapiro
(December 31, 2025) — The Middletown Garden Club is pleased to present a talk entitled “Monet’s Living Masterpiece: The Gardens at Giverny” by noted art historian Rhea Higgins on January 15, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. at the Durham Community Center, 144 Pickett Lane in Durham. The program is free and open to the public. The Community Center is handicapped accessible.
Claude Monet, a leading exponent of Impressionism, has long been known for his beautiful depictions of late 19th century life in Paris and in the French landscape. Less familiar is the fact that from 1890 to the last 30 years of his life, the gardens at his home in Giverny became his real and living masterpiece. Monet enthusiastically poured money into new plantings for his gardens there, which he organized with special care to color and color relationships.
The garden spaces allowed him, for the first time in his life, to actually control colors and textures of the landscape that surrounded him. They became for him his brand new canvas and a creative focus of his life until he died in 1926. After Monet’s death and a brief interlude, his estate was restored in 1977, largely with American funds from the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation in New York City. Today, it expresses what the artist labored to create: a living palette of color relationships that illuminates the beauty of the planted vegetation.
Rhea Higgins taught for many years in the Art History department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford. She holds a BA from Smith College and an MAT from Harvard. She also taught at Wesleyan in the Graduate Liberal Studies Department. Her particular area of expertise is 19th century European painting, with an emphasis on post-Impressionist artists. Her talk will include both contemporary photos and Monet’s paintings of the gardens in bloom, the waterlily ponds and the interior of his home known as the pink house as well.
