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. [Read more →]

The Tim Rogers Band perform at ‘Starry Nights’, an evening event hosted by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra during the ‘Masterpieces from Paris’ exhibition – visit the NGA’s Facebook or Flickr pages for more of their photographs. @National Gallery of Australia

On Sunday evening, 5 pm local time, the doors finally closed at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia on the ‘Masterpieces from Paris‘ exhibition. By all accounts, the exhibition closed on an incredible high for the Gallery. [Read more →]

The Grand Palais in Paris will host a major exhibition of Claude Monet’s art from September 22, 2010 to January 24, 2011.

The first major exhibition 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. [Read more →]

Claude Monet. The Japanese Footbridge [Le Pont japonais]. c. 1920–22. Oil on canvas. 89.5 cm x 116.3 cm. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Grace Rainey Rogers Fund.

Review of ‘Monet’s Water Lilies’ at MoMA, New York

It took me a long time to get down to the much-loved exhibit of six of Monet’s late garden paintings, created in his 70s and 80s at Giverny. Fortunately, though the one large exhibit room was crowded, one could still spend some time with the paintings which I did. [Read more →]

Claude Monet. London, Parliament: sun through the fog
[Londres, le Parlement: trouée de soleil dans le brouillard]. 1904. Oil on canvas 81 cm x 92 cm. © Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

I recently visited Canberra and went to the National Gallery of Australia to see the Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond exhibition that is on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibition has attracted record-breaking attendances for an exhibition in that Gallery (it now stands in excess of 250,000 attendees). After Canberra the exhibition tours to Tokyo and San Francisco before returning to Paris. [Read more →]

“We predicted that we would get 250,000 people, but we didn’t predict that we would get 250,000 people six weeks before the finish of the exhibition and before Easter,” he said. “So we’re very thrilled about that.” Ron Radford, Director National Gallery of Australia, 2010.

The summer exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, has broken previous attendance records. The exhibition opened 4 December 2009, and on Friday 26 February Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery, personally welcomed the 250 000th visitor. According to tourism statistics, around 70% of the visitors are from outside Canberra. The previous record was set in 1992, with Rubens and the Italian Renaissance which attracted 241 770 visitors. [Read more →]

Camille Pissarro, View of Rouen, 1898, oil on canvas. © Honolulu Academy of Arts

The role played by the city of Rouen in the history of Western art at the end of the nineteenth century is immense. Camille Pissarro is said to have remarked that “Rouen is a beautiful as Venice”.

This summer the museum of Fine Art in Rouen will host a major exhibition of Impressionist artists as part of the Normandie Impressionniste 2010 festival: