Thirty years since the last great Monet exhibition at the Galéries Nationales, le Grand Palais, a lifetime of prolific painting is celebrated once more in a display of around 200 of Monet’s works. Paintings are on loan from public and private collections abroad and within France, including some from the Musée d’Orsay. The result is a striking array of masterpieces that has attracted unprecedented numbers of visitors.
Undoubtedly the most consistent exponent of Impressionism, Claude Monet was born in Paris and was brought up from 1845 in Le Havre on the Normandy coast before returning to Paris to study painting. As for most impressionist artists, Paris remained the centre of his artistic world but he made frequent painting expeditions to river and sea, and from 1871 he made his homes in the suburbs, progressively further downstream at Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Poissy and finally, in 1883, at Giverny.
The essence of the French Impressionists’ art – the recording of the world about them as it presented itself to their eyes in its immediate, transitory aspect – required them to spend time in the countryside. And the countryside they frequented most was in the north and north-west of Paris, the broad valley of the meandering Seine and of its tributaries the Oise and the Epte, and on to the coast. As a result, most of the world’s greatest collections of Impressionism are located in this region, and many of the art museums visited have been refurbished and extended.