The work of Claude Monet (1840-1926), one of the founding fathers of Impressionist art, consistently reflects the artist's profound love of nature. Many of his paintings were directly inspired by the gardens that played such an important role in his life - those at his two homes in Argenteuil in the 1870s, followed by a garden at his estate in Vétheuil. Yet the most famous of Monet's gardens was the expansive park in Giverny, which inspired his masterful handling of light and color for more than thirty years and provided motifs for hundreds of individual paintings and series that remain so very popular today-among them the masterpieces of his Water-Lilies series. This magnificent volume of full-page color plates is devoted to this central theme in the work of the French artist. It presents landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of people in natural settings from nearly all of Monet's creative periods-from his early Impressionist paintings of the 1870s to the Grandes Décorations. (English edition ISBN 978-3-7757-1439-6) Exhibition schedule: Kunsthaus Zürich, October 29, 2004-March 13, 2005