The story
In 2016 the museum in Giverny asked the public to buy a flower. For five euros anyone could pay for a daisy, or even a single petal, in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist painter and passionate gardener. The work was his Bed of Daisies, begun around 1892 as a decoration for the dining room of his house at Petit-Gennevilliers and left unfinished when he died in 1894. Its best-preserved parts survive as four panels of the same size, covered edge to edge with daisies, and the appeal, backed by public and corporate donors, brought them into the collection.
Caillebotte was a close friend of Claude Monet and a fellow gardener, and Monet's house and water garden are a short walk down the village street. The museum began in 1992 as the Musée d'Art Américain, founded by the Chicago businessman Daniel Terra to show the American painters who flocked to Giverny after Monet settled there in 1883. In 2009 it became the Musée des impressionnismes, with a wider brief covering Impressionism, its roots and its echoes in later art. The low building is set into the hillside, with gardens around it.
The museum's own collection is still young. Besides the daisies there is a late Monet of water lilies with willow branches, Eugène Boudin's view of the harbour basin at Deauville from 1884, and an early study of Port-en-Bessin by Paul Signac, given to the museum in 2019.
