Seeing Colors: Secrets of the Impressionists is coming to the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia on October 22nd, 2011.

Featuring forty paintings including two by Monet, three by Pissarro, two by Boudin, a beautiful Bazille landscape based on a Monet sketch, two by Renior, and others, students enrolled in the museum seminar at The College of William & Mary have a rare and exceptional opportunity to work behind the scenes of this major exhibition. The class changes everyday so students never know exactly what to expect – a day in Professor John Spike’s class ranges from monographic lectures on the artists in the show, to talks from the Museum Director Dr. Aaron De Groft, to hands on work towards the hanging of the show. During the first week of class students chose their specific task teams including tour guides and docent training, public relations, creating education material, writing painting labels, and even putting together a musical tour to accompany the show, and they have been hard at work ever since.

The exhibition is on until 22 January 2012. For more information on what students are up to, countdown to the opening with the class blog.

Claude Monet, 1878, The Rue Montorgueil in Paris. Celebration of June 30, 1878. Oil on Canvas 81 cm x 50 cm. © Musée d’Orsay.

Today, on the eve of what is being billed as one of the most significant art exhibitions in Paris for years, it is hard to imagine that the artist in the spotlight was once dismissed by the very nation that now holds him up as a national hero. Tomorrow, 22 September 2010, is the opening at the Grand Palais in Paris of the first major retrospective in thirty years of Claude Monet’s work.

Today Nicholas Sarkozy, the President of France, in a Foreword to the exhibition catalogue describes Claude Monet as “unmistakable emblem of the international influence of French culture”. Nearly 150 years ago, art critics scoffed at Monet and his friends’ new style, calling it “delusional”. Prominently displayed in the retrospective then is Monet’s Rue Montorgueil (above), a painting that depicts the celebrations at the end of the World Fair of 1878 and demonstrates French nationalist and republican enthusiasm of the time.

The Monet exhibition in Paris is expected to break all attendance records – which is not surprising really given that no movement in the history of Western art is more popular than Impressionism. A movement of art for which Claude Monet is widely regarded as its father.

With nearly 160 of Monet’s oil paintings on exhibit, this exhibit is by far the biggest collection of his paintings bought together in one exhibition. Sadly, because of institutional rivalries, some of Monet’s iconic images will be missing from the exhibition – including the painting that gave its name to the movement, i.e. the painting of the Le Havre harbour at sun rise, Impressionism, soleil levant (below).

To see those ‘missing’ paintings – go to Musée Marmottan Monet, where from 7 October 2010 – 20 February 2011 their entire collection will be on display for the first time ever.

These paintings aside, the Monet exhibition in Paris is a must for anyone with even the remotest interest Impressionist art.

Visiting Paris? See my Paris Impressionist Guide, where you will find information on other Impressionist-related sites and museums in the French capital.

It is no longer possible to buy ticket for this exhibition online. You can, however, buy tickets online for what I believe is a much better exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet, also in Paris, the museum that has the World’s biggest collection of Monet’s paintings and drawings. For more information, and a link to buy tickets, click here: Monet at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.

Opening times:
Friday to Monday 9h to 22h,
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 10h à 22h,
Thursday 10h à 20h
Last access – 45 minutes before closing
24 and 31 December 2010 – the exhibition shuts at 18h
25 December 2010 – the exhibition is closed

Entry Fee 12€
Reduced to 9€ for people aged between 13 and 25, and unemployed

Would you like to take a 5 day guided tour of Monet’s Normandy, while staying in a luxury B&B? Now is your last chance this year to see Monet’s garden in Giverny, and then visit the two Monet exhibitions in Paris, as well as some of the other landscapes and cityscapes in Normandy the Impressionist artists painted … Guided Tours of Monet’s Normandy.

Buy a copy of the Catalgue online – cheaper than at the gallery.

Need a hotel? click here for best deals on Paris hotels.

There are only a few weeks left to catch the “Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism” exhibition on at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. The show comprises 38 paintings from the Joslyn Art Museum’s Impressionist collection and the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, a selection of mid nineteenth to early twentieth-century French and American landscapes. The likes of Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet are joined by some of the more important American Impressionists of the time, such as Frederick Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent.

Other French artists included in this joint venture between the Joslyn Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum are Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin and Jules Breton. There are also a number of American artists who lived and painted in Giverny, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Leroy Metcalf and Julian Alden Weir. Impressionism was not a definable style with a unified set of principles, but rather a group of artists who came together with shared ideas. The juxtaposition of various paintings enables viewers to appreciate this first-hand.

Also on exhibit at the Joslyn Art Museum at this time are three paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The three paintings from Boston that make up a small companion exhibit, entitled Beyond Impressionism, are:
Vincent van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with Ploughman, painted in 1889
Claude Monet’s Meadow at Giverny, painted in 1886
Paul Gauguin’s Women and a White Horse, painted in 1903

The two exhibitions are on until 12 September 2010. For further details, visit the Joslyn Art Museum’s website, click here.

The Normandy Impressionist Festival is in full swing, with an impressive and diverse programme of events taking place throughout Normandy, some of which last up until November. Most however end in September. So if you are planning to come to Normandy, or have been thinking about it – it really is not too late to catch some of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 buzz.

Rouen is a focus for this exhibition, for all sorts of reasons, and the organising committee and the various administrative departments in the city have not wasted any opportunity to associate the usual annual events that take place in that city with the Impressionist Festival. For example, the inauguration of Arne Quinze’s installation ‘Camille’ on Rouen’s Bastille Day celebrations.

And, for Impressionist fans like myself, Impressionism is really everywhere in the city of Rouen. I thought I would share these photographs with MGN readers who were not able to make it to Rouen, or Normandy to enjoy the Festival. The image above is a standard poster advertising the exhibition in the Fine Arts Museum of Rouen – one of the highlights in which are 8 versions of Monet’s painting of the Rouen cathedral. In the photograph below the logo of the ‘Normandie Impressionniste 2010′ festival is projected onto one of the administrative buildings for the Department of Seine Maritime.

Still thinking about coming to Normandy? Booking.com has some great hotels in Rouen and Normandy more generally to choose from. Great deals in hotels that range from 1 to 5 stars to suit any budget.

I could go on talking about Monet for hours! I’m absolutely fascinated by this artist and by the way he painted. His paintings about his gardens in Giverny are mystical and mysterious, but also experimental and he kept studying on them. He could dive into a subject and paint it over and over to make it look exactly like the vision he had in mind. Monet was one of the first abstract painters, he was keen on experimenting and creating a new art movement. Arne Quinze

The city of Rouen is one of a number of towns and cities in Normandy taking part in one of the greatest festivals in celebration of Impressionism and the Impressionist artists in 2010. To mark this occasion in a grand way, Arne Quinze was commissioned to create an installation; he created Camille for Rouen, a tribute to Camille Doncieux, Claude Monet’s wife.

This amazing installation has been constructed out of ’sticks’ of wood that creates a kind of canopy over the Boieldieu Bridge that spans the River Seine. The official launch of Arne Quinze’s Camille in Rouen was at the beginning of July, and it will remain in place until the end of August.

Read more about the artwork in an interview on the Irenebrination: Notes on Art, Fashion and Style website with Arne Quinze about Camilleand Rouen here. (From where the above quote from Quinze was taken.)

I took the following photographs on Bastille Day, 14 July 2010, in the afternoon and then in the evening during the spectacular firework display that lasted for some 25 minutes.

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The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, will host a major exhibition of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces from the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. for the first half of 2011.

The Houston show will have a selection of 50 paintings from the National Gallery of Art´s 19th century French collection while the galleries that usually house these works are closed for repair and renovation. The National Gallery´s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection includes work from the greatest artists active in France from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century, a collection that ranks amongst the finest of any collection in the world. These include works by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh.

‘Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art’ is to be installed in the MFAH’s European galleries, Audrey Jones Beck Building. The MFAH’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art will be kept on display for the duration of the temporary exhibition. But, about 50 works from other periods will be temporarily removed to make way for the loan pieces.

To accompany the exhibition will be a 184-page, fully illustrated book that provides a history of the collection and individual entries on each painting.

The exhibition opens 20 February, and runs through to 22 May 2011. Entry will be by timed-entry tickets, and these go on sale from 13 December 2010. Click here to link through to the Museum of Fine Arts’ website.

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol —Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875. Oil on canvas, 19.48 cm x 24 cm @ The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

If you are planning your trip to Houston now and are in need of a hotel, I recommend one of the leading American hotel comparison websites, which has over 100 Hotels in Houston for you to choose from. You will find a good choice of hotels that range from 1 to 5 star. Making a booking online is easy and safe, and so is changing your reservation should you have to.

The two museums that make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young and the Legion of Honor, are hosting concurrently two exhibitions on Impressionist art. The Birth of Impressionism exhibition at the de Young has one hundred masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. And, to provide a historical context to these well-known paintings, the Legion of Honor is hosting Impressionist Paris: City of Light.

With the invention and installation of the gas street lamp in the nineteenth century, Paris earned itself the name ‘city of light’. The street lights and their evening glow attracted a great deal of attention from various artists, authors, composers, but particularly visual artists, including painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. And it was at about this time that the group of painters who would come to be known as the Impressionists were starting out in Paris.

The exhibition at the Legion of Honor explores various aspects of Parisian society and French art from about 1850 through to the end of the nineteenth century. On show are more than 180 prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, as well as illustrated books dating from 1850 to the early 1900s, taken from the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and other distinguished private collections.

There are picturesque, old views of the narrow streets and stone bridges by Charles Marville and Charles Meryon as well as colorful images of a more modern Parisian setting by such artists as Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Georges Seurat. Various prints and periodicals which feature the work of Honoré Daumier, Edouard Manet, Paul Signac, and James Tissot convey significant events in the rise of illustrated art journalism. Black-and-white works on paper by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Paul Gauguin reveal another aspect of Parisian culture at this time. There are also galleries that are devoted to popular entertainment in late 19th-century Paris, including colorful images of the theater, café-concerts, circus, as well as the Expositions Universelles. The exhibition concludes with a colourful selection of posters from the turn of the 20th century by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, Théophile Steinlen, and Alphonse Mucha.

“This exhibition gives us a special opportunity to show off some of the Fine Arts Museums’ greatest treasures from its holdings of 19th-century French works on paper, including an outstanding group of new acquisitions that will be shown here for the first time,” says exhibition curator James A. Ganz. “It is conceived as a journey from the dark alleys of ‘Old Paris,’ at the dawn of the Impressionist era, to a world of color and light, culminating in a gallery of vibrant French posters from the turn of the 20th century.”

Charles Marville, Street lamp, 8 Place de l’Opera, 1870s. Albumen silver print from wet-colldion-on-glass negative © The Legion of Honor.

Impressionist Paris: City of Light at the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, runs from 5 June to 26 September 2010.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition on the Legion of Honor’s website. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

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Oh to be in San Francisco this summer! The beautiful West Coast city aside, the two Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young and the Legion of Honor, are hosting two major Impressionist exhibitions. At de Young is Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, while the Legion of Honor is hosting Impressionist Paris: City of Light, a special exhibition that provides historical background to de Young’s Birth of Impressionism show.

Through one hundred paintings of some of the great artists living and painting in France from the mid to late nineteenth century this exhibition demonstrates the changes that took place in Western art at this time, i.e. the birth of what was to be called Impressionism.

The following is a list of just a few of the paintings on display at de Young this summer:
The Fife Player by Edouard Manet (1866)
Racehorses Before the Stands by Edgar Degas (1866–1868)
Family Reunion by Frédéric Bazille (1867)
The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868)
The Cradle by Berthe Morisot (1872)
The Dancing Lesson by Edgar Degas (1873–1876)
The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte (1875)
The Swing by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)
Red Roofs, Corner of the Village, Winter Effect by Camille Pissarro (1877)
Saint-Lazare Station by Claude Monet (1877)
Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878 by Claude Monet (1878)
Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley (1878)
L’Estaque by Paul Cézanne (1878–1879)
Portraits at the Stock Exchange by Edgar Degas (1878–1879)
The Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879)

An impressive list of artists and paintings indeed!

Claude Monet. Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878. 1878. Oil on canvas. 49 cm x 80 cm. ©RMN, Musée d’Orsay.

Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay at de Young runs from 22 May through to 6 September, 2010. This exhibition will be followed by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, 25 September 2010 until 18 January 2011.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

Get your copy of the exhibition catalogue from Amazon before you go:

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The first major exhibition in France of Claude Monet’s work in over 30 years will take place at the Grand Palais in Paris from September 22, 2010 to January 24, 2011. It has been reported that there will be over 200 paintings on display from both French and foreign museums.

This showcase event for the Paris arts calendar in 2010 will trace the 19th century painter’s long career, starting with his early landscapes in Normandy and the Paris region from the 1870s through to the iconic and well known depictions of his garden and ponds in Giverny.

Following a major Picasso show at the Grand Palais in 2008 that attracted 784,000 visitors, the Monet exhibition is predicted to attract in excess of half a million visitors.

Online tickets are no longer on sale for the Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais. You can, however, buy tickets online for what I believe is a superior exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet, also in Paris, the museum that has the World’s biggest collection of Monet’s paintings and drawings. For more information, and a link to buy tickets, click here: Monet at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.

Still available online: your copy of the Grand Palais Monet Exhibition Catalogue.

Exhibition opening times:
Fridays – Mondays: 9 am to 10 pm,
Wednesdays 10 am – 10 pm,
Thursdays 10 am – 8 pm
Last access – 45 minutes before closing
24 & 31 December 2010 – the exhibition closes at 6 pm
The exhibition is closed on Tuesdays, and on 25 December 2010

Standard Entry Fee 12€
Reduced to 9€ for people aged between 13 and 25, and unemployed

Not only is the exhibition itself one not to be missed by anyone with a passion for Claude Monet’s art, or impressionist art in general, but the setting in the Grand Palais will provide a wonderful ambiance. Built for the Universal Exhibition in 1900, the Grand Palais covers some 775,000 square feet in the form of an H and its glass roof is recognisable from a long distance, the biggest in Europe.

NB: there is also a great temporary exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet from 7 October 2010 – 20 February 2011, with many iconic images that are not included in the Grand Palais exhibition.

The following article that gives details of the three museums with paintings by Monet in Paris. And my Paris Impressionist Guide gives some more travel tips for visiting Paris.

Get your copy of the Exhibition Catalogue online – cheaper than at the gallery.

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“Clemenceau came to pay us a visit after lunch and stayed until 5 o’clock. … He was so amazed by the garden, and the water lilies, that he said to his daughter as he left: ‘You know, on the way home we are going to sell Bernouville, there is nothing more to be done after seeing Monet’s garden!’” Alice Monet, June 1909*

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, has in its collection a number of Claude Monet’s paintings of the pond he created, the water lilies and the Japanese bridge. These include the large triptych, Water Lilies (1914–26), a painting of the water lilies in the pond, Water Lilies (1914–26), The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26).

These paintings have a special status within MoMA’s collection, this museum was the first public collection in the United States of America to acquire one of Monet’s large-scaled paintings. For a limited time, these paintings, and two loans of similar paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be on show for the first time in MoMA’s new Manhattan building.

“Monet’s Water Lilies” will be on show until 12 April 2010. A book, titled Claude Monet: Water Lilies by Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence, that recounts the history of Monet’s water lilies paintings in the Museum’s collection has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

Claude Monet. Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows. 1914–1926. Oil on canvas. 51 1/4″ x 78 3/4″ (130.2 x 200 cm). Private collection. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Look in the photograph at the top of this article to see the reflections of the weeping willows on Monet’s pond.

Click here, for more information about the exhibition on MoMA’s website. If you have seen the exhibition, leave a comment below.

*Quote from page 57, Monet’s Garden in Giverny inventing the landscape. 2009. Musées des Impressionnismes, Giverny.