More than 100 French Impressionist masterpieces heading to Australia
Works by artists including Monet, Renoir and Degas will travel from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to the National Gallery of Victoria in what will be one of the largest and most significant collections of French Impressionism ever exhibited here.
More than 100 masterpieces from artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas are heading to the National Gallery of Victoria, in what will be one of the largest and most significant collections of French Impressionism ever exhibited in Australia.
The works, which also include paintings by Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot, are part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s globally renowned collection.
They will travel to the NGV next year for its Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition.
The exhibition will chart the trajectory of the late 19th century art movement, whose founders boldly broke tradition by rejecting the conventions of the state-sponsored Salon and banded together to exhibit their impressionist works independently.
Some 150 years later, the French Impressionists still “continue to capture our imagination,” and “inform us of the importance of the here and now,” MFA Boston curator Katie Hanson said.
Ms Hanson said the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition would focus on the “humanity” of the artists.
“We really wanted to bring, not just the works of art, but also the ideas behind those and bring in the artists’ own words, things they said about themselves, their moments of triumph, their moments of anxiety and the things they had to say about one another,” she said.
Exhibition highlights will include one gallery containing 16 works painted over a 30-year period by Monet, depicting stunning scenes from Argenteuil, the Normandy coast, the Mediterranean and his garden in Giverny.
Other highlights will include Renoir’s 1883 work “Dance at Bougival”, as well as Édouard Manet’s 1862 painting “Street singer”, which Ms Hanson said was “a perfect encapsulation of being in a modern, urban environment”.
“The fact that he could see that when that environment was new in the newly Haussmannian Paris and that it feels still so fresh and relatable here in 2024 is a great testament to his artistic vision,” Ms Hanson said of Manet, whose works served as inspiration for the French Impressionists.
MFA Boston’s significant collection arose from bequests from Bostonians who were early collectors of impressionist works, some of whom visited the artists in France during the movement.
French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston originally opened at the NGV in 2021 but shut down after only 30 days due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exhibition will reopen on 6 June 2025 and will include additional paintings which have never been seen in Australia before.
