Claude Monet, ‘The Grand Canal (Le Grand Canal)’, 1908 © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Osgood Hooker 1960.29
Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery 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. National Gallery, London, 9 April – 29 July 2018.]]>
Source: National Gallery of Art, London
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.
Buildings played substantial, diverse, and unexpected roles in Monet’s pictures. They serve as records of locations, identifying a village by its church (‘The Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect’, 1882, Collection of John and Toni Bloomberg. Promised gift to The San Diego Museum of Art.), or a city such as Venice (‘The Doge’s Palace’, 1908, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of A. Augustus Healy 20.634), or London (‘Cleopatra’s Needle and Charing Cross Bridge’, about 1899–1901, Eyles Family courtesy of Halcyon Gallery) by its celebrated monuments.
Architecture offered a measure of modernity – the glass-roofed interior of a railway station, like The Gare St-Lazare (1877, The National Gallery, London) – whilst a venerable structure, such as ‘The 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 (‘From the top of the Cliffs, Dieppe (Du haut des falaises, à Dieppe ou La falaise à Dieppe’), 1882, Kunsthaus Zürich, Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde). 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).
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Claude Monet – The Rouen Cathedral series by Monet
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