Did Monet Cook with La Cornue?

Monet’s Kitchen in Giverny, France

Check out Monet’s Range

If you ever visit Paris in the summer time, be sure to take a side trip to Monet’s home in the village of Giverny outside of Paris. Here you will see the spectacular gardens that were featured in some of his most famous paintings, as well as the country house where Monet lived with his large family from 1883 until he died in 1926. Although the house was there from the start, Monet was responsible for everything in the interior.

The blue kitchen has many copper pots and pans that were once used daily, but they also provided a contrast with the blue tile from Roen. The kitchen leads to an adjacent yellow dining room, demonstrating that Monet employed the generous use of vivid colors to identify his various rooms. Then again, our White House has a blue room, green room, and a red room.

Being an appliance geek, I had to check out the huge cooker above in the blue Monet kitchen. I made the assumption that the stove was La Cornue. If so, it must have been added by Monet after he’d been in the house at least 25 years, since La Cornue was founded in 1908, and Monet moved into the house in 1883. Also worth noting, this stove is a wood and coal cooker with a chimney, and I believe that even the early La Cornue cookers were gas fueled. My conclusion, the range in Monet’s house is probably not a La Cornue. Too bad for poor Claude, a great innovater with his painting – not so much with his appliances.

Now, this IS a La Cornue above. I copied the photo of this awesome range from the La Cornue website. What an amazing piece of cooking equipment! Love that La Cornue rotisserie on the left.

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