A s my train inched its way into the station at La Souterraine, some three hours south of Paris on a blisteringly hot June afternoon, the woman in the seat next to me asked: “ Vous descendez ici? ” Her expression seemed to say “Really? You’re getting off here? ” I could see what she meant. Behind the wire fencing lining the platform lay a handful of industrial buildings alongside nondescript looking farmland. I had arrived in La Creuse – one of the departments the French call la France profonde – deepest, darkest France – and apparently the country’s least-visited region, north of Limoges and 65 miles south-east of Poitiers.
Within minutes, however, things started to look up: I found myself driving through rolling hills and strikingly green valleys, with overhanging hedgerows separating fields and pastures where the rust-coloured Limousin cattle were grazing in the sun. I was on a quest to find the landscape that had inspired the painter Claude Monet , a landscape which, unlike his Rouen, Paris and London, which he painted many times, remains relatively unknown. In early 1889, several years before he started his world-famous water lily series, Monet spent several months in the countryside near the small village of Fresselines, about an hour’s drive north of Limoges.
Like his fellow impressionists, 49-year-old Monet was on the lookout for locations to paint in the open air, and a friend of his, art critic Gustave Geffroy, suggested La Creuse. Monet was soon.