The short answer
Claude Monet settled in Giverny in 1883. Four years later, a few hundred metres from his house, Angélina and Lucien Baudy turned their shop into an inn: the Hôtel Baudy, June 1887 — some twenty rooms at a low price, a hillside garden, and a studio built for the purpose.
From 1887 until the First World War, this is where the American colony of Giverny lodged. Not in a travellers’ hotel: in a house that spoke their language, cooked their food and built them north-facing skylights.
What the register proves
This is not inferred, it is read. From 1887 to 1899 the house kept a guest register — some seven hundred entries, recording for each lodger their profession, age, residence, the country of their passport, their previous address, their destination, and the dates of their arrival and departure.
It is the source that makes it possible to say with certainty who slept here, and when. It has one limit: the register begins in 1887, and so can say nothing of the first two seasons.
It is no longer at Giverny. The original is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Archives of American Art hold a 1989 microfilm, reel 4236, the only form in which it can be consulted.
We now give the lines concerning the painters of the house to be read, transcribed and cited: the Hôtel Baudy guest register.
What it cost, what it gave
Five francs a day, board and lodging. For that: a room, a dining room where canvases hung on the walls, an “American-Bar”, two tennis courts, and the grocery counter where easels, stretchers and brushes could be had.
Above all, studios. A free-standing pavilion built in the garden in 1887, under a north-facing skylight, to finish indoors what had been begun outdoors; two more fitted under the roof in 1890. The enlargement carried out between 1888 and 1891 made the whole the first establishment in France designed for painters.
When money was short, a lodger settled the bill by leaving a canvas. That is how the house came by a collection, and how sketches for works that later became famous stayed on its walls.
Before, and alongside
Tradition has it that Willard Metcalf pushed open the shop door as early as 1886, and that Angélina Baudy nearly turned him away before catching sight of his painting kit. The register, which begins only in 1887, cannot confirm that date.
From 1898 the colony had a second centre: Frederick William MacMonnies and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies settled in the village’s former priory, bought in 1901, where a summer school-studio opened in 1905. The hotel was not the only address — but it was the first, and the longest-lived.
Who, by name
This site carries twenty-six entries for painters connected with the house or the village, each one distinguishing what the sources establish: lodger attested by the register, documented presence at Giverny, or work in the surrounding valley.
Three stays are attested by the house’s own register: Paul Cézanne in 1894, Dawson Dawson-Watson and Theodore Earl Butler. For the others, the site says what it knows, and does not fill the gaps.
