Picturing Paris: Monet and the Modern City

The French painter Claude Monet is best known for working en plein air, capturing the effects of light on waterlilies at Giverny, and was one of the founding figures of the first Impressionist exposition in 1874. This exhibition, however, takes Monet’s earlier cityscapes of Paris as its central focus. On April 27, 1867, the artist asked for special authorization to paint “views of Paris from the windows of the Louvre.” Rather than copy the masterpieces inside the museum, as had generations of artists before him, Monet turned in the opposite direction, toward the city itself.

This exhibition brings together three of Monet’s important cityscapes of Paris painted from an elevated viewpoint inside the Louvre: Oberlin’s Garden of the Princess, plus two horizontal cityscapes from the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunstmuseum in the Hague. These works are some of Monet’s earliest renderings of Paris, painted shortly after the opening of Paris’s World’s Fair in April 1867, and attest to the city’s importance as a growing modern metropolis.

This exhibition is a partnership with the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.