Wholesale Monet: Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, boasts one of the largest collections of the celebrated impressionist artist Claude Monet’s work outside France. This book reproduces all 35 oil paintings by Monet in the MFA’s permanent collection, representing nearly the full span of Monet’s long career. An introductory essay presents a brief account of his acclaim in Boston during his lifetime, and entries for the 35 paintings provide an overview of his life and work. Early plein-air compositions from the 1870s, as well as Grand Canal, Venice (1908), a later example inspired by his travels abroad, mark his enduring fascination with watery surfaces, utilizing vivid color and varied brushwork to dazzling effect. A grouping of works related to his life-long appreciation for Japanese art and culture is anchored by La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) (1876), a full-length portrayal of his wife Camille in a lavishly embroidered kimono. His 1875 composition Meadow with Poplars inspires another section, as its depiction of poppies, poplar trees and grain stacks foreshadows the recurrence of these themes in his painting throughout the decades to follow. Claude Monet (1840-1926) trained with the plein-air painter Eugène Boudin among others, continuing his studies from 1859 onward in Paris, where he met Pissarro, Bazille, Sisley and Renoir. At their first exhibition in Paris in 1874, Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant prompted critics to mockingly describe him as an impressionist.