Claude Monet, “Morning on the Seine, near Giverny”, 1897, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Mrs. W. Scott Fitz..
Claude Monet, “The Ice Floes (Les Glaçons)”, 1880, oil on canvas, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont.
Monet’s paintings of the River Seine at MFAH Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents ‘Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River’, an exhibition that chronicles Monet’s abiding fascination with the iconic French waterway. October 26, 2014, to February 1, 2015.
Source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
“I have painted the Seine throughout my life, at every hour, at every season,” Claude Monet once said. “I have never tired of it: for me the Seine is always new.” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presenst Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River, an exhibition that chronicles Monet’s abiding fascination with the iconic French waterway. A selection of 52 paintings by the Impressionist painter is displayed, beginning with scenes of leisure activities, modern life and cityscapes along the Seine River and culminating in the ethereal works from the famous Mornings on the Seine series (1896–97).
Monet (1840–1926) grew up in Le Havre, a port city at the mouth of the Seine, and although he spent several years in Paris, where in 1874 he spearheaded the group of young artists who came to be known as Impressionists, he chose more often to live outside the capital, in smaller towns on the banks of the river. The French towns of Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Poissy and Giverny all served as home bases from which the artist explored the surrounding countryside and the Seine itself, crossed by new road and railway bridges, dotted with pleasure boats and shipping vessels, filled with ice floes or glowing with sunlight. In hundreds of paintings he captured every aspect of life on the river and chronicled the ever-changing nature and poetic beauty of the river itself. Monet once famously gestured at the Seine and remarked, “This is my studio.”
In 1898, Monet exhibited works from a painting series entitled “Mornings on the Seine” to great critical acclaim. Each canvas focused on the same spot on the Seine near Monet’s Giverny home, where he anchored his studio-boat before dawn in order to capture the pale light and indefinable colors of the mist-covered river at daybreak. These paintings, perhaps the most refined and contemplative expression of the serial approach Monet had been using throughout the decade, confirmed his reputation as the dean of French landscape. This series of ethereal, nearly abstract paintings is the culmination of the exhibition and the artist’s exploration of his subject.
“This beautiful show brings together more than 50 works loaned from almost as many locations, from rural Shelburne, Vermont, to Shizuoka, Japan,” said Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “These canvases provide an intimate look at the Seine, one of the subjects most essential to Monet’s identity as an artist.”
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