Claude Monet’s Water Lilies can feel like a dream until you stand in his garden at Giverny, the Japanese bridge arching over the pond, wisteria hanging low, light scattering across the water exactly as he painted it. It’s uncanny, like walking into the brushstrokes of the canvas. Artist homes around the world hold that same strangeness: the overlap of the ordinary and the extraordinary. In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul still carries the weight of her presence: the mirror above her bed, the wheelchair pulled up to a paint-stained easel, the courtyard alive with cacti. In St Ives, Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes sit in her garden exactly as she left them, their surfaces slowly changing with the salt air. To visit these homes is to step into the spaces where life and art blurred, where daily rituals and masterpieces were made in the same rooms.
Artist homes that you can visit around the world
Frida Kahlo, Mexico City, Mexico
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Casa Azul, the Blue House, is at once intimate and theatrical, much like Kahlo’s art. The courtyard, shaded by jacaranda trees and spiked with cacti, leads into rooms still filled with her life: Tehuana dresses hanging in glass cases, the bed with its mirror overhead, her wheelchair pulled up to a paint-smeared easel. Her longtime companion Diego Rivera’s presence is here too, in the books, the photographs, the riot of folk art. Walking through feels like stepping into a vivid, defiant self-portrait.
Claude Monet, Giverny, France
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