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Claude Monet
The Saint-LazareRailway Station (La GareSaint-Lazare), 1877
Oil on canvas
54.3 x 73.6 cm
© The National Gallery, London |
In a landmark show at the National Gallery in
spring 2018 – the first purely Monet exhibition to be staged in
London for more than twenty years – there is a unique and
surprising opportunity to discover the artist as we have never
seen him before.
We typically think of Claude Monet as a painter of landscape, of
the sea, and in his later years, of gardens – but until now
there has never been an exhibition considering his work in terms
of architecture.
9 April – 29 July 2018
Sainsbury Wing
Admission charge
Featuring more than seventy-five paintings by Monet, this
innovative exhibition spans his long career from its beginnings
in the mid-1860s to the public display of his Venice paintings
in 1912. As a daring young artist, he exhibited in the
Impressionist shows and displayed canvases of the bridges and
buildings of Paris and its suburbs. Much later as an elderly
man, he depicted the renowned architecture of Venice and London,
reflecting them back to us through his exceptional vision.
More than a quarter of the paintings in The Credit Suisse
Exhibition: Monet & Architecture come from private collections
around the world; works little-known and rarely exhibited.
Buildings played substantial, diverse, and unexpected roles in
Monet’s pictures. They serve as records of locations,
identifying a village by its church (Église de Varengeville,
effet matinal, 1882, Private Collection), or a city such as
Venice (The Doge’s Palace, 1908, Brooklyn Museum), or London (Cleopatra’s
Needle and Charing Cross Bridge, about 1899–1901, Private
Collection) by its celebrated monuments. Architecture offered a
measure of modernity – the glass-roofed interior of a railway
station, like the Gare Saint-Lazare (1877, National Gallery,
London) – whilst a venerable structure, such as La Lieutenance
de Honfleur, (1864, Private Collection), marked out the historic
or picturesque. Architecture aided Monet with the business of
painting. A red-tiled roof could offer a complementary contrast
to the dominant green of the surrounding vegetation (The Cliffs
at Dieppe, 1882, Kunsthaus Zürich).The textured surfaces of
buildings provided him with screens on which light plays, solid
equivalents to reflections on water (Rouen Cathedral, 1893–4,
Private Collection).
A man-made structure helps the viewer engage with the experience
of a Monet landscape. A distant steeple (The Church at
Varengeville, 1882, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts) or nearby
house (Gardener’s House at
Antibes, 1888, The Cleveland Museum of Art), are marks of scale,
responding to our instinct to read our physical surroundings in
terms of distance, destination, and the passage of time involved
in transit. Architecture can stand in for absent human presence
and suggest mood, whether it be awe at the grandeur of a
historical monument (San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908, Private
Collection), thrill at the vitality of a teeming city street (The
Pont Neuf, 1871, Dallas Museum of Art), or loneliness at the
solitude of the clifftop cottage (The Douanier’s Cottage, 1888,
Fogg Art Museum, USA).
Monet & Architecture will be displayed in three sections – The
Village and the Picturesque, The City and the Modern, and The
Monument and the Mysterious – and will explore how one of the
world’s best-loved painters captured a rapidly changing society
though his portrayal of buildings.
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Claude Monet
Argenteuill, the Bridge under Repair(
Argenteuil, le pont en réparation),
1872
Oil on canvas
60 × 80.5 cm
The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
On Loan from a Private Collection.
© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
It will feature a rare gathering of some of Monet’s great
‘series’ paintings – five Dutch pictures from trips made in the
early 1870s, 10 paintings of Argenteuil and the Parisian suburbs
from the mid-1870s, seven Rouen Cathedrals from 1892–5, eight
London paintings from 1899–1904, and nine Venice canvases from
1908.
Monet & Architecture will feature exceptional pairings, such as
both paintings of the church at Vétheuil, which Monet made
immediately on arrival in the village in late 1878 (one Scottish
National Gallery, the other Private Collection). One was shown
at the 4th Impressionist exhibition in 1879, and the other at
the 7th in 1882, but they have never been seen together. The
National Gallery's well-known Thames below Westminster (1871)
will be seen alongside a picture of the beach at Trouville
(1870, Private Collection), made only months before with the
same size canvas and a very similar composition.
Many world-famous and much-loved Monet pictures will be
travelling to London: the Quai du Louvre (1867, Gemeente Museum,
Den Haag), one of his first cityscapes; the Boulevard des
Capucines (1873, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)
shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 where it
aroused controversy; and the flag-filled Rue Montorgeuil, 30
June 1878 (Musee d’Orsay) made to celebrate the celebration of a
national holiday.
Through buildings Monet bore witness to his location, revelling
in kaleidoscopic atmospherics and recording the play of sunshine,
fogs, and reflections, using the characteristics of the built
environment as his theatre of light. He said in an interview in
1895 “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat … I want to
paint the air that surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat –
the beauty of the light in which they exist.”
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The Quai du Louvre (Le Quai du
Louvre), 1867
Oil on canvas
65.1 ×92.6 cm |
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The exhibition is curated by Monet scholar Richard Thomson,
Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of
Edinburgh. He says “It is a guest curator's dream to be able to
bring so many arresting paintings by such a great artist
together and to combine them in groupings which bring out new
ways of seeing his unrivalled work.”
Director of the National Gallery, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, says
“Monet’s sensibility to the pull of light across buildings,
bridges, and water continues to astound today’s audiences. His
images of Rouen, Paris, and London have become part of the
visual landscapes of our imagination.”
David Mathers, CEO of Credit Suisse International, said: “We are
delighted to be sponsoring Monet & Architecture during the tenth
anniversary of the partnership between Credit Suisse and the
National Gallery. This landmark exhibition will showcase a bold
reinterpretation of Monet’s paintings. With more than a quarter
of the works in the exhibition drawn from private collections
around the world, often little-known or rarely exhibited, this
will provide a unique opportunity to experience these paintings
in a very innovative and imaginative context.”
Open to public: 9 April 2018
Daily: 10am–6pm (last admission 5pm)
Fridays: 10am–9pm (last admission 8.15pm)
Admission charge
Members and under-12s (ticket required) FREE
Booking tickets
For advance tickets to The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Monet &
Architecture, please visit nationalgallery.org.uk or call 0800
912 6958 (booking fee). You can also book tickets in person from
the Gallery.
Overseas customers can contact us by dialling +44 020 7126 5573.
Book online and save.