This exhibition closed after 30 days. Now it’s coming back – with a twist
The National Gallery of Victoria will in 2025 bring back the short-lived French Impressionism exhibition for its Winter Masterpieces series.
Originally staged in 2021, French Impressionism was open for only 30 days before COVID restrictions meant the exhibition closed, and the loaned pieces were shipped back to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Racehorses at Longchamp 1871, by Edgar Degas, possibly reworked in 1874.Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The re-staged exhibition will be both the same and different. Featuring work by artists including Renoir, Monet, Degas, Cassatt and Cezanne, the bulk of the original show will be returning, except for one painting and one print, while the exhibition design will be re-imagined and the order of the rooms will be changed slightly.
“The 19th century interior” will be one of the cues designers look to, explains Miranda Wallace, senior curator at NGV. It will nod to “the context in which a lot of these paintings ended up, in terms of the Boston homes that they were bought for before they were donated,” she says.
Victorine Meurent, self-portrait c. 1876.Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“It’ll have more of a period feel to it than the last exhibition did, which was very contemporary.”
Ted Gott, also a senior curator at the gallery, says: “It was very modern, the last installation. This one will be very warm and sensuous.”
One of the undercurrents of French Impressionism is the relationships the featured artists had with one another – their jealousies and insecurities as well as the support they offered. It means that names and faces recur throughout the show – including that of Victorine Meurent.
A favourite model of Manet, Meurent appears in the exhibition in his work as well as in one of three newly added paintings – a self-portrait that has never previously been exhibited in Australia.
The second of the new works is by Degas, “which is a painting showing Degas’ father listening to a guitarist and is a reflection of the kind of intimate, musical soirees that these artists often held or attended each week”, says Wallace.
Victorine Meurent by Edouard Manet c. 1862.Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Rounding out the trio is a painting by Jean-Francois Raffaelli, who, Wallace says, was “very popular [and] also critically acclaimed, but I think fell out of favour faster with with with fashion in art because he was more of a realist painter.”
It’s because the works are so familiar and so well known that it is worth seeing them in person, Wallace emphasises – it’s easy to forget that at the start, the Impressionists were outsiders and their work was controversial.
“A lot of the aesthetic is not finished and polished in the way people might imagine when they see reproductions,” she says. “The actual encounter with the works, I think, reminds you of why this was a refreshingly new way of painting.”
“They may be now considered to be the establishment, but it’s a very liberal establishment,” says Gott. “I think that’s why Impressionism remains perpetually popular, and it never goes out of date – because it just screams freedom of expression and liberty.”
French Impressionism will be at NGV International from June 6 to October 4, 2025
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