L overs of Impressionism’s founding father, Claude Monet, are eagerly awaiting the upcoming Monet & Architecture exhibition which opens at the National Gallery in London on 9 April and runs until 29 July.
Monet lovers should also take note that Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale on 14 May will see an important late Monet, Matinée sur la Seine, go on sale in New York.
While Monet is most readily associated with his famous landscape paintings, the National Gallery exhibition will include more than 75 works which explore the artist’s widely varying studies of buildings. It brings together some of his earliest works from the mid 1860s, and travels with him through the towns and cities of Europe where he lived and worked throughout his life.
In paintings like the Quai du Louvre (1867) we see the landmarks of Paris he painted as a young artist while exhibiting in the early Impressionist shows.
We see the windmills of the Netherlands, where he moved in 1871, his famous Rouen Cathedrals, all the way though to London’s riverside landmarks in works like Thames Below Westminster (1871) and the monumental edifices of Venice, painted towards the end of his life.
For lovers of Monet, it’s a unique opportunity to see a collection of works that have never shared a gallery before, and to see many of his great ‘series’ paintings re-united.
A compelling and poignant late work by a true master, Monet's Matinée sur la Seine, which will be offered in the Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale in New York on 14 May, is part of a series of more than twenty canvases the artist completed between 1896 and 1897 near his home in Giverny. Painted from a studio boat anchored in the middle of the Seine, the works are among Monet’s last depictions of the river that had provided him with so much inspiration.
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